JEWISH HISTORY 



Special Series No. 5 



SKETCH OF JEWISH HISTORY 



BY 



GUSTAV KARPELES 



TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN 




PHILADELPHIA 

The Jewish Publication Society of America 
1897 






Copyright, 1897, by 
The Jewish Publication Society of America 



^ 



PREFATORY NOTE 

The following lectures, translated from the Ger- 
man, were delivered by Doctor Karpeles during 
the winter of 1895-96 before the lodges of the 
Independent Order B'ne B'rith at Berlin. The 
translation is done from stenographic notes printed 
as manuscript and not published. A few slight 
changes have been made. 

A brief and graphic sketch like this necessarily 
brings the individual views of the writer into great 
prominence. There may be room for other views 
diverging widely from his. The Committee be- 
lieves, however, that the work will be useful in 
stimulating readers of Jewish History to a renewed 
and more vigilant examination of the subject in 
works they have not read carefully, as well as in 
the great work of Graetz, with which all have a 
certain familiarity. 



A solitary little vessel is drifting on a vast 
ocean ; neither wind nor wave can do it harm. Oft- 
times the mountain-high billows seem about to suck 
it into their swirl and sink it to the .bottoarof t^ie 
sea ; but ever again it rides upon the crests of the 
waves, serenely sailing on in its course. Under this 
metaphor our sages of old conceived the history of 
Israel. Israel is the tiny craft sailing in loneliness 
across a boundless ocean. Again and again he 
seems about to be engulfed by the nations ; again 
and again it looks as though Israel were stricken 
forever from the list of the peoples of earth, but 
he always reappears, rejuvenated, with added num- 
bers, with increased strength. 

To draw a picture, however sketchlike, of Is- 
rael's history from its earliest beginnings to the 
present time, it is necessary to divide it up into 
several periods. Naturally, the bound- E ochg 
ary lines between the periods cannot of Jewish 
be sharply drawn. As it is, text-books History 
of history have too long held to the traditional 
division into the epochs known as ancient times, 
middle ages, and the modern period. In point of 
fact, the ancient times overlap the so-called middle 
ages, which in turn trench upon the modern pe- 
riod. The division hitherto accepted must sooner 
or later be abandoned. Historians treating of Is- 
rael's vicissitudes are more favorably situated. 

(7) 



8 JEWISH HISTORY 

Israel's antiquity is a well-defined period ; it comes 
to a close on a certain day, that on which the 
destruction of Jerusalem and the loss of national 
independence occurred. The mediaeval period was 
of great length, reaching down even into the last 
century. The reader can, therefore, judge for him- 
self of how long a modern period we have the right 
to speak. 

Closer inspection of the history of Israel, how- 
ever, reveals six great periods, the end of each 
marked either by the removal of his activity to a 
new scene, or by a change of his attitude towards 
the problems of the spiritual life. 

The first of these periods naturally is that ex- 
tending from the earliest glimmering of historical 
consciousness to the destruction of the First Tem- 
ple and the Captivity of Israel in Babylonia, the 
period to be considered in this paper. The return 
of the Babylonian exiles to Jerusalem and their 
fortunes until the total annihilation of national in- 
dependence are embraced in the history of the 
second period, the most remarkable and the most 
important in the life of Israel, who, in its course, 
originated a new religion, Christianity. 

The third period covers nearly ten centuries, 
during which the amazing intellectual work depos- 
ited in the two Talmuds and their cognate litera- 
ture was accomplished. The fourth period opens 
with the real diaspora, the great migration of Is- 
rael from the Orient, in quest of a new home 
among the nations, which he found with the Arabs 
of Spain and northern Africa, where the Jewish 



JEWISH HISTORY 9 

mind unfolded in new and prolific beauty, and gave 
to the mediaeval periods of Israel's history their 
characteristic impress. 

The fifth period of Jewish history begins with 
the day of Israel's faring forth from Spain, his 
second home, once more to seek an abiding place. 
In the search, the nation is scattered over the 
European lands Holland, Germany, Poland, every- 
where. It is the period of stagnation in the intel- 
lectual life of the Jews, the reaction from exuber- 
ant productiveness to lassitude and sterility a 
period during which the woe inflicted by the out- 
side world is ever on the increase, and the spirit of 
the nation lies crushed into impotence. It lasts 
until the middle of the eighteenth century, until 
Moses Mendelssohn inaugurates a new era by in- 
troducing the Jews into the intellectual life of 
Germany, and through it once more into the civili- 
zation of the world at large. The inspiration of 
this our sixth and last period has not yet expended 
its force, and the current of thought that will call 
forth its successor cannot be predicted. 

He who enters upon the consideration of the his- 
tory of Israel in the spirit of critical research, as one 
might study, for instance, the history of the Phoeni- 
cians, the Arabs, or the French, will find much that 
is incomprehensible and inexplicable. The fact is, 
and it is conceded by cool, dispas- peculiarity 
sionate, even hostile historians that of Jewish 
the history of the Jews is a history Histor y 
of miracles and enigmas. But the miracles and 
enigmas are explained by the course of the history : 



10 JEWISH HISTORY 

the history is testimony to the truth of the mircu 
cles ! The historical account remains a riddle only 
to him who scans it callously and phlegmatically ; 
but he who considers it with the eye of faith, who 
approaches it mindful of the biblical injunction : 

11 Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place 
whereon thou standest is holy ground," sees every 
feature of the history clearly; before him the 
development of Israel lies as an open book, telling 
how he has risen from humble, obscure beginnings 
to a position of prime importance in the culture 
and evolution of mankind. 

On a sunny day so reports the first modern 
historian of the Jews nomad tribes entered the 
land of Canaan ; they were our ancestors. We 
open the first books of the Bible, for in treating of 
the earliest period of Israel's history, we are in 
the fortunate position of having but to repeat an 
oft-told tale, whose incidents are part and parcel 
of our memory. Who is not familiar with the 
stories of the Bible ? The Garden of Eden is dis- 
closed to our view ; we hear the serpent hiss ; the 
rush of the waters of the deluge falls upon our 
ears ; Noah's ark arises out of the abyss of de- 
struction ; with absorbed interest we follow the his- 
tory of our patriarchs, the exemplars of our race. 
Patriarch- The f atner f our nation, Abraham, 
al History appears before our vision, sturdy and 
great, towering above his age. In a time in which 
men and beasts are offered as sacrifices everywhere, 
he understands God's summons to sacrifice his only 
son in the spirit, and so realizes that human sacri- 



JEWISH HISTORY II 

fices are never to be brought in Israel ; that all the 
sacrifices current among the nations are to be es- 
chewed in Israel. Then Isaac, the upright, appears, 
the provident father intent upon the well-being of 
his family, and Jacob with his sons, the little sheikh 
and his nomad tribe, journeying to Egypt, where the 
Israelites spread and multiply in the course of the 
centuries. We read the charming story of Joseph 
its pathos brings tears to our eyes and we marvel 
at the wondrous deliverance of the Israelites from 
Egyptian bondage. A small tribe of nomads they 
had entered, a great nation they departed, amid 
signs and wonders, pursued by Pharaoh, guided by 
divine Providence, and led by another 
spiritual giant, who towers not only 
above his own generation and age, but above all 
the generations and all the ages, the divinely in- 
spired man Moses ! What a figure ! Not the art of 
Michael Angelo sufficed to body forth his heroic 
proportions. With three mountains his history is 
connected. On Horeb his mission originated ; on 
Sinai it reached its culmination ; on Nebo it was 
accomplished, and there Moses found his grave, 
yet "no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this 
day." Through this man Moses Israel was made 
the recipient of divine revelation in the Law, which 
has been his guiding star during all his days. 

In this Israelitish Law, three great cycles 
of thought are crystallized. By their 
application to life, Israelitish history e aw 
develops into Jewish history, and Jewish history 
into the history of Christianity, or rather, into the 



12 JEWISH HISTORY 

history of human civilization. The Law holds in 
solution, first, the belief in one God ; second, the 
belief, that He has proclaimed a moral law by 
which our life on earth must be regulated ; and 
third, the belief, that all men are members of a 
great world-family of the future, foretold by 
divine promise; in other words, the belief in a 
Messiah, in the Messianic time. 

These three lines of thought Mosaic legislation 
ushered into existence, and upon them rests the 
everlasting and universal value of Judaism, not to 
be depreciated by any amount of detraction. 

Two peoples of antiquity originated, preserved, 
and transmitted to modern times all the treasures 
Jews and of humanity the Hellenes and the 
Hellenes Jews. Let us ask ourselves in all 
candor, what the character of human development 
would have been, if Greek culture alone with its 
continuation in Roman guise had moulded it. 
It admits of no doubt, that the Judaic spirit was 
indispensable to the symmetrical unfolding of the 
human mind. By how much tiny Israel surpassed 
his Hellenic contemporaries in ethical thought ! 
Israel was the first to insist : " Thou shalt not kill ! n 
The old chroniclers tell us that the Greek moun- 
tains often resounded with the cries of infants, 
and the waters of the Greek rivers often washed 
on shore the little children abandoned by their 
parents. To kill slaves was permissible ; they 
were considered property, pure and simple, and no 
court, no authority could curtail the owner's right 
over them. Contrast with such views the Jewish 



JEWISH HISTORY 1 3 

attitude towards life and its responsibilities ! 
With the ordinances of every, festival the admo- 
nition is coupled: "Thou shalt hallow the feast, 
thou, thy manservant, thy maidservant, and thy 
stranger within thy gates." The most civilized 
nation of antiquity severely excludes strangers, 
whom it calls "barbarians"; the Israelitish Law 
enjoins : " Love thy neighbor as thyself " ; or what 
is still more remarkable : " Love ye the stranger, 
for you have been strangers in the land of Egypt." 
Do not such principles raise the little Israelitish 
nation high above the Hellenes and other ancient 
disseminators of civilization, in fact, above the na- 
tions of later times ? The triumph of our system 
of living lies in this, that modern dogmatism, in all 
its extent, has not gotten beyond Skmd Israel, 
the belief in one God, nor modern ethics, beyond 
Weahavta le-Reakha kamokha, " Love thy neigh- 
bor as thyself." A horde of day-laborers in brick 
and mortar were entrusted in the desert with the 
fundamentals of theology and morality, and as re- 
ceived by them they have come down to our day 
miracle acknowledged alike by poet and by scientist. 
Herder says of it : "A history like this, with all its 
concomitant and dependent circumstances, cannot 
be a lying invention. Israel's Revelation, still 
incomplete, is the greatest miracle of all ages, and 
will continue until the last phase in the history 
of all the nations of the earth is reached." The 
importance of Israel, to be sure, has been mis- 
understood again and again. Men have not been 
able to conceive, how it was possible for a people 



14 JEWISH HISTORY 

only now escaped from the Egyptian taskmaster 
to become imbued with the idea of one God in a 
time characterized everywhere by polytheism. The 
instinct for monotheism was therefore invented 
and attributed to Israel. What a childish evasion, 
to give the name instinct to a sublime ethical 
idea, and to lodge it in one particular people, 
wanderers in the desert ! The Greek Olympus was- 
peopled with a multitude of gods. A plurality of 
gods cannot co-exist without discord and dissension. 
As mankind progressed, the gods were divided into 
male and female, but between the sexes, too, there 
is never-ending opposition. For Israel it was re- 
served to be the proclaimer of the belief in one 
God in a time given over to the worship of many 
gods. This belief was his salvation, his mission, 
his history. 

Now he enters the Holy Land, and sojourns there 
Conquest nearly eight hundred years. Curiously, 
of the Holy after the death of Moses, the account 
Land f Israel's progress is, on the whole, 

meagre and inadequate. We imagine a people 
devoted to the task of conquering the Promised 
Land from its inhabitants, zealous in expelling and 
exterminating its neighbors, deserting its God, and 
going after strange gods, rebelling against its lead- 
ers, and scorning the admonitions of its prophets. 
If this is all, the picture of the historical develop- 
ment of Israel in the early years of his existence 
as a nation is incomplete. From the moment Israel 
enters his old home, two currents can be traced : one 
political , one moral-religious. The political history is 



JEWISH HISTORY I5 

free from all obscurity, yet we are filled with amaze- 
ment at seeing Israel maintain his national strength 
as long as any people of antiquity. Neither Greeks, 
nor Assyrians, nor Romans had so long a period of 
national expansion. Modern Bible critics, who 
pluck the Bible to pieces with a wantonness that 
would not be tolerated in the study of Greek or 
Latin classical works, are far from agreed as to the 
time of the composition of Israel's most important 
poetic productions. Nearly all, however, unite 
in considering the Song of Deborah as the first 
blossom in the garden of Hebrew poetry. It 
is, indeed, worthy of note, that in this first 
Hebrew triumphal ode reference is made to the 
Revelation, the greatest miracle in history; in in- 
spired measure the time is celebrated when the 
Lord went forth out of Sei'r. Our point of view is 
different from that of the critics, but even if we 
granted theirs to be the correct one, we should, 
nevertheless, consider Deborah's mention of the 
Revelation on Sinai as a verification of the awe- 
some event. As early as Deborah's days, we must 
infer, the Revelation was accepted, not only as an 
indisputable fact, but as an historical and religious 
event of the most far-reaching importance for 
Israel and humanity. 

The time of the Judges is one of internal dissen- 
sion and of violent struggles with the The 
surrounding- tribes. The end of the Kingdom 
period is again signalized by the appearance of a 
remarkable figure, crowned with the aureole of 
poetry and enveloped in the splendor of history 



16 JEWISH HISTORY 

Samuel the Priest. He is the last of the Judges 
and the inaugurator of the era in which kings rule 
Israel, a period of national glory, but at the same 
time one in which the religious idea is not main- 
tained at the height to which it had been elevated 
by the generation blessed with the Revelation and 
by its successors. National self-consciousness at- 
tains its supreme development under David and 
Solomon. The erection of a central sanctuary in 
Jerusalem strengthens royal authority, and the 
foreign alliances negotiated by Solomon, his sa- 
gacity, his liberal, far-sighted policy, confer good 
repute upon Israel among the other nations. His 
prayer at the dedication of the Temple is one of 
the loftiest products of Jewish intellectual activity, 
the more remarkable as it belongs to a time in 
which many of the author's subjects inclined to 
idolatry, built altars, set up images, and neglected 
the service of the one God. From this time the 
above-mentioned double current becomes plainly 
visible: on the one hand, political power, now 
effectual, now paralyzed ; on the other hand, the 
moral-religious current, controlled by the prophets, 
whose influence transcends by far the boundaries 
of their time. 

The prophets have been called " divine dema- 
The gogues " by the modern writer Renan 

Prophets they have been likened to the mod- 
ern socialists and revolutionary leaders. The com- 
parison may appear irreverent, but it is seen not to 
be destitute of truth, when one remembers that 
they ventured to chide a people, the greater part of 



JEWISH HISTORY 1 7 

which had invited destruction by iniquitous and 
impious conduct a people, rebellious not only 
against the prophets, but against its kings and its 
God! In such days the divinely-inspired men 
stepped forth, and taught Israel how far he had 
departed from the path of rectitude, how disloyal 
he had become to the noble ideals of his faith. 
With equal manliness and courage they rebuked 
the other nations, holding up to each the mirror of 
correction and repentance. Still more! In that 
age of relentless struggle an age in which the old 
Greeks were busy investing the gods of their 
Olympus with intensely human attributes the 
prophets arose and proclaimed to mankind the be- 
lief in a new time, to be realized perhaps in a far- 
off future, when all nations "shall beat their swords 
into ploughshares," when war shall cease from off 
the earth, and men shall recognize, that in heaven 
above there is but one God, the Ruler of the uni- 
verse, and here below but one brotherhood of united 
mankind. Such a vision in such times! In all 
human history, in the whole process of the evolu- 
tion of spiritual life, no analogy can be found to 
the Hebrew prophets. It is incomprehensible how 
one can hope to explain, by the circumstances 
of their time, the nature of men who considered 
themselves specially called and empowered to exe- 
cute a high mission, to spread abroad the idea, 
that the day will come when but one religion 
will prevail on earth, which not even in our days, 
perhaps least of all in our days, would meet with 
acceptance. This is the idea to be borne in mind. 



18 JEWISH HISTORY 

For to know the history of a people, it is not 
necessary to be acquainted with all its names and 
numbers, its kings and princes, its prophets ahd 
poets. The fundamental idea must be grasped and 
" remembered : In the desert Israel was made the 
recipient of a Revelation teaching belief in the one 
God, forbidding murder, and enjoining love of one's 
neighbors, though they be aliens in tongue and 
faith. Israel was made the bearer of a Law that 
to this day appears as the remote, unattainable, 
ideal goal of the moral and civil development of 
man, prohibiting, as it does, usury and the taking 
of interest, and preventing the concentration of 
vast riches and property. Five hundred years 
later the prophets proclaimed the belief in a noble 
future, in which the whole world will worship one 
God ; in which humanity, faith, religious conviction, 
will be one and inseparable. 

These three basic thoughts must be digested to 
understand the history of Israel, to comprehend 
his preservation in the face of a world of enemies. ' 

What the development of Jewish life would have 
been, had the prophets not thundered their admoni- 
tions at a people standing on the brink of destruc- 
tion, is idle speculation. It is enough for us to know 
that clear-eyed they discerned impending ruin, and 
warned Israel by painting the picture of his per- 
secutors. 

Israel, however, continued in the path he had 
chosen. The two realms separated, and Israel, the 
kingdom of northern Palestine, appealed to the 
enemy to compose internal differences. Shalma- 



JEWISH HISTORY 19 

neser, the Assyrian, came with a host, and he 
came not to help the kings of Israel, but to anni- 
hilate the kingdom of Israel, the king- The Ten 
dom of the Ten Tribes. That hap- Tribes 
pened in the year 720 before the common era. It 
is remarkable and perhaps one of the profoundest 
mysteries of the Jewish past, that the Ten Tribes 
never reappear in history. In the Talmud we are 
told that the remnants of the Ten Tribes were 
scattered, and are to be sought for here and there, 
but no one has ever found, and probably no one 
ever will find, a visible trace of them. Judah, the 
possessor of Jerusalem, maintained itself for about 
two centuries, until 587, until the mighty conqueror 
Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian, over- Destruction 
ran it, and Jerusalem and the Temple of the First 
suffered their first destruction. Temple 

With this catastrophe the first period of Jewish 
historical development closes. On the ruins of 
the Temple sits Jeremiah, one of the loftiest of 
Israel's prophets, and when we read his Lamenta- 
tions to-day, we feel as though he were addressing 
them not only to the crushed Israelites, his con- 
temporaries, but to the Israel of our time. "What 
shall I compare unto thee, O daughter of Jerusalem ? 
what shall I find equal to thee, that I may comfort 
thee, O virgin daughter of Zion? for great like 
the sea is thy breach ; who can bring healing to 
thee?" "Oh! how doth she sit solitary the city 
that was full of people is become like a widow ! 
she that was so great among the nations, the prin- 
cess among the provinces, is become tributary!" 



20 JEWISH HISTORY 

So the prophet laments, and consolation he finds 
nowhere. Jeremiah goes into exile with his people, 
and even in the bitterness of banishment he con- 
tinues to affirm the belief, that better days are in 
store for his poor Israel. Another prophet, Ezekiel, 
joins the exiles, and as they journey through Ramah 
a voice is heard groaning and weeping. Far as the 
eye can reach, no human being can be discerned ; 
it is a ghostly voice, the voice of Rachel, the 
mother in Israel, weeping for her children and re- 
fusing to be comforted. Then, like a whisper from 
heavenly heights, they hear the soothing words : 
"Refrain thy voice from weeping, and thy eyes 
from tears ; for there is a reward for thy work, 
saith the Lord, and they shall return from the land 
of the enemy l" And they did return ! 



II 

As so often in the subsequent history of the 
Jews, we hear at the close of the first period the 
bitter lament : Our hope is put to shame, our 
enemies have ravaged us, our Temple is dismay 
tied, our* God has abandoned us all is over! This 
is the plaintive strain resounding again and again 
in the history of Israel, but no less do we hear 
accents of joy, when the situation changes. And 
the change never failed to come. If history is read 
with intelligent attention, with a philosopher's eye, 
a different idea of it can be derived from that to 
be gathered from a mere compilation of names and 
dates, wars, victories, and revolutions. History has 
no worth unless we abstract from it a practical 
application, a moral. We shall gain the moral of 
Jewish history by and by. If it does not obtrude 
itself in the course of our presentation of the sub- 
ject, it will prove that we have fallen short of clear- 
ness and precision. 

The hope of the Jews, then, was utterly quenched. 
They went into captivity with nothing to secure 
their solidarity: their home was given The Cap- 
over to the stranger, the relentless tivit y 
enemy had driven them forth into distant lands. 
But lo ! was it one of the whimseys of chance, 
was it the first harbinger of the wondrous fate that 
was to preside over the Jews* whole history? 
their very conqueror Nebuchadnezzar proves to be a 
(21) 



22 JEWISH HISTORY 

gracious monarch unto them in their exile lands, his 
very people are favorably inclined to the forlorn 
sojourners. They are put upon a footing of equality 
with his other subjects; they build houses, they 
cultivate fields. In short, scarcely fifty years 
elapsed, and they were looked upon as acceptable, 
respected citizens of the land they had entered a 
mob of captives. In the half century, to be sure, 
they had had to suffer the caprice of successive 
monarchs. After Nebuchadnezzar came his son, 
who was not so kindly disposed towards them. 
Then the violent wars broke out that were to pre- 
cipitate the Babylonian empire from the height of 
its puissance into destruction. The legend of King 
Cyrus is well-known : how he with his troops in 
one night captured the beleaguered capital, killed 
the king, and united the realm with his own. Now 
golden days dawned for the Jews. It is held, that 
Cyrus knew their religion, and was therefore filled 
with friendly intentions towards them. It certainly 
is true, that he poured out upon them the abundance 
of his kindness, and even granted them permission 
to return to their country. With inde- 
The Return scribab j e jubilation the news was re- 
ceived, though not all availed themselves of the 
precious privilege of going back. Fifty years after 
their banishment , forty-two thousand J ews j ourneyed 
homeward from Babylon, singing psalms, as tradi- 
tion has it, with the recurring refrain : Happy the 
nation whose protector is Jehovah, who has helped 
it, and led it forth out of the land of the enemy ! 
The word was fulfilled: "When the Lord bringeth 



JEWISH HISTORY 23 

back again the captivity of Zion, .... then shall 
our mouth be filled with laughter, and our tongue 
with singing.' ' The returning exiles set out on 
their homeward journey, accompanied by the ardent 
blessings and loaded down with the gifts and treas* 
ures for the rebuilding of the Temple showered 
upon them by their brethren who remained behind. 
They had so intimately identified themselves with 
their Babylonian neighbors, that they could not 
endure the idea of uprooting and transplanting 
themselves. 

Exaltation and jubilant rejoicing were followed 
by their natural revulsion, a time of disappoint- 
ment, weary discouragement, and listlessness. As 
no traveller has yet gone to the Holy Land to 
satisfy the sad-hued yearning of his heart for a 
sight of the spots hallowed by patriarchs and 
prophets without suffering acute disenchantment ; 
so the exiles, expecting to take possession of the 
Promised Land, according to the poetical descrip- 
tion, flowing with milk and honey, inherited devas- 
tation and desolation. The Temple was a ruin; 
the place on which it had stood was strewn with 
its debris. There was nothing for it but to begin 
at the very beginning. The work of restoration 
was all the harder, as they had but one hand free . 
to employ in building; the other wielded the sword 
against their enemies. Foremost among them was 
a mixed populace of older residents. TheSamar- 
called Samaritans. They at first met itans 
the Jews with friendly advances, and offered assist- 
ance in the erection of the Temple. Knowing what 



24 JEWISH HISTORY 

to expect from such false friends, the Jews rebuffed 
them. In revenge, the Samaritans, under the 
leadership of Manasseh, the son of a priest, erected 
a Temple on Gerizim, designed to be the competitor 
and rival of the sanctuary in Jerusalem. It was 
not the last time that the Samaritans made the life 
of the Jews miserable. It is characteristic of the 
religious life shaped by Judaism, that its dissenting 
sects either perished at birth, or never got beyond 
a sort of galvanized existence. The Samaritans 
have maintained a semblance of life up to this day. 
Only a short while ago a letter of the Samaritan 
high priest fell into my hands, in which he com- 
plains, that the Jews still regard his nation as 
their enemy, and spread the report that it worships 
a dove. In all, he says, the Samaritans count one 
hundred and twenty families, who are so poor that 
they depend upon alms. This precisely, as we 
shall see in the course of our presentation, is the 
history of the other sects that time and again 
separated themselves from the body of the Jews. 
Meanwhile hopeless discouragement seized upon 
the Jews. "The stars in their courses" battled 
against them: hail and other untoward phenomena 
destroyed their seedling crops, and their harvest 
yield was small and wretched. In vain the last 
prophets, Haggai and Zachariah, tried to rouse 
their energies. Again, with the abruptness of a 
miracle, an event occurred, apparently incapable of 
explanation, which was to effect a complete trans- 
formation in the situation of the Jews of the Holy 
Land. One day a priest from Babylon arrived in 



JEWISH HISTORY 2$ 

Jerusalem and with him a goodly company of 
priests, Levites, Nethinim, and Israelites. He 
came fortified with a letter from the 
king of Persia, and freighted with the 
free-will offerings of his brethren, who, though liv- 
ing in the land of exile, never "forgot Jerusalem." 
The priest was Ezra, " a ready scribe in the Law 
of Moses," and justly called the "second Moses" 
by posterity. From him the second great period 
of the history of Judaism dates. Of wide vision, of 
exalted conception of life, fearless and courageous, 
pure of heart, and strenuous in action, he was in 
every respect fashioned to be the reformer of his 
people. After he had settled in Jerusalem, his 
first work was directed towards the correction of 
a widely prevalent abuse. In their degenerateness, 
shepherdless as they were, their first leader 
Zerubbabel had not been strong enough the Jews 
had intermingled with the heathen. Jews had 
married heathen women, who had introduced them 
to the vices of the heathen nations. Ezra assem- 
bled the whole people on a Feast, and read them 
the Law, emphasizing the passages in which mar- 
riage with the heathen is rigorously forbidden. 
The reading of the Law aroused astonishment in 
those days. Eighty years had passed since the 
return of the Israelites from Babylon; they had 
forgotten all they had known of the Law; of the 
prohibition to intermarry with the heathen they 
were completely ignorant. The people murmured. 
But Ezra knew when to employ unmitigated 
severity. The heathen women were excluded from 



26 JEWISH HISTORY 

the circle of the Jews, the building of the sanctuary 
was energetically resumed, and in the year 516, 
eight hundred years after the redemption from 
Egyptian servitude, the second Temple was con- 
secrated. Among the participants in the solemn 
The Second service were some that had seen the 
Temple first House. They wept bitterly, for 

the splendor of the first sanctuary was unattain- 
able. Yet, despite their repining, it had to be con- 
ceded, that the prophecy had been fulfilled: the 
glory of the first Temple had been renewed. Sorry 
and insignificant as it was, the Temple had been 
toilsomely rebuilt by a handful of people with 
their scanty hoardings. They had a national sanc- 
tuary, a centre about which they could rally. 

Fourteen years later a man of equally heroic 
stature, Nehemiah, came from the East to Jerusa- 
lem, likewise bearing costly gifts and 

Nehemiah . , , , . ~^ 

accompanied by brave warriors. These 
two leaders together, Ezra and Nehemiah, set about 
a great and laborious undertaking, the reforma- 
tion of Judaism. The time of Ezra and Nehe- 
miah is wrapped in profound darkness. We are 
much better informed about the period preceding 
it than about the time of Ezra and his successors, 
The who were called the Soferim> Scribes, 

Scribes not, of course, to be taken in the 

modern sense of the word. But we know that 
they accomplished a precious, imperishable work : 
they set down in writing the Pentateuch, thus res- 
cuing it from oblivion for all future generations, 
for the whole world. Many refuse to believe that 



JEWISH HISTORY 2J 

the Bible was composed as it has been transmitted 
to us, and that, as we assume, the Five Books of 
Moses were written by Moses, the Book of Joshua, 
by Joshua, etc. Most German critics maintain, 
that the essential parts of the Law were composed 
by Ezra and his co-laborers, the Soferim. The 
reproach necessarily incurred by these critics, that 
they brand our pious fathers as forgers, as cunning 
priests, they cast off from themselves by every 
manner of effort to justify their views. They hold 
that Ezra put the Law together out of the rem- 
nants of folk tales and popular conceptions. We 
cannot here pursue this subject further. He who 
reads the Five Books of Moses, I do not say with 
the eyes of faith, but with unbiased, unclouded 
mind, must at once recognize the futility of such 
criticism. Has nation ever been heard of that 
would allow a solitary priest suddenly to impose 
upon it a legal code like that prescribed in the 
Mosaic Law ? We believe, and shall hold fast to 
the conviction, that Ezra, on the Feast of Taber- 
nacles, read to the Israelites the Five Books of 
Moses, which had fallen into oblivion, and that all 
the men and women, the hoary and the young, 
took upon themselves anew the obligation to regu- 
late their lives according to the mandates of the 
inherited Law. 

Another report from those remote days meets 
with incredulity, that then and later a synod ex- 
isted called the "Men of the Great Assembly," 
whose task was, on the one hand the adaptation of 
tradition to new circumstances, on the other, the 



28 JEWISH HISTORY 

preservation of the old traditions in their purity. 
This great synod, modern critics say, never ex- 
The Great isted. But whatever their opinion, the 
Assembly Men of the Great Assembly were the 
conservators of tradition. If there had not been 
such men as we imagine the leaders of the Great 
Assembly to have been, the myth-shaping fancy 
of the people would have had to create them in 
order to arrive at a natural explanation for the 
preservation of the body of tradition. 

For about two hundred years the Israelites 
lived peacefully under Persian and Median rulers, 
until one day a great event again stirred Israel 
mightily. The hero was the prince that deserves 
perhaps to be called the greatest of antiquity, 
Alexander Alexander the Great. On his tri- 
the Great umphal march through the world he 
did not pass Jerusalem by. He had gone as far as 
India in his conquering progress, and now he was 
advancing with a mighty army against tiny Jeru- 
salem. No doubt the city will fall a prey to his 
power, and Israel is on the verge of destruction. 
Dressed in flowing robes, and followed by a retinue 
of pious priests, the high priest goes out to meet 
the warrior. The priests are the bearers of gifts 
to the hero; they open the gates of the Holy City, 
and entreat his mercy. And lo ! the world-con- 
quering Alexander assures them of his gracious 
inclination towards them, and that he had had no 
thought of attempting the capture of Jerusalem. 
The appearance of the high priest has so over- 
whelmed him that his attendants cannot account 



JEWISH HISTORY 29 

for his emotion. The story is told, that in the 
desert Alexander was visited by a dream, in which 
he was shown the high priest as he now met him, 
interceding for his land and people. And though 
he subdues all other lands, he spares Jerusalem, 
and with his army withdraws from Palestine. He 
gives the Jews assurance of his favor, and pro- 
mises them protection against their oppressors. 

Unfortunately, the empire established by him 
was of short duration ; lands so widely separated 
could not be brought under one sceptre perma- 
nently. His realm was divided up under his im- 
mediate successors, and the Israelites again became 
the prey of strange nations. The Egyptians pos- 
sessed themselves of their land and its defenseless 
inhabitants. Ptolemy Lagi likewise was favorably 
inclined towards the Jews, and many of them were 
taken by him to his own land. Eleven thousand 
Jews were settled in Egypt in this way, and their 
migration marks the beginning of a tremendous 
movement within Judaism. A fraction of the race 
had remained in Babylonia, the kernel was in Jeru- 
salem, and now another fragment, not by any means 
the most despicable element, left the mother coun- 
try and settled in Alexandria, the most influential 
centre of culture in the old world. The Jewish 
colony in Alexandria was scarcely a Aiexan- 
hundred years old and this is char- drianjews 
acteristic of the intellectual aspirations and en- 
dowments of the Jewish people when the Jews 
wrote Greek as well as, in part better than, the 
Greeks themselves. They even composed Greek 



30 JEWISH HISTORY 

verse, so perfect that they could venture to at- 
tribute it to Sophocles. At that time a little Jew 
was wont to pass through the streets of Alexandria 
to the museum. When he opened the door, silence 
fell upon all within. It was Philo the Jew, who, 
the Greeks admitted, wrote Greek as well as Plato, 
the classic ideal of Greek literature. The Jews were 
authors, philosophers, actors, merchant princes, 
and all this less than a century after entering 
Egypt as aliens. Here for the first time in the 
history of mankind Jew met Greek, the two chief 
promoters of ancient civilization, whose achieve- 
ments for the preservation of science are greater 
than those of all other nations. The first contact 
between them, at least in Alexandria, was cordial. 
The Jew Philo was the founder of the Neoplatonic 
philosophy, concerning which I shall mention only 
the one fact, that it became the basis of the Church 
philosophy of the middle ages. Moreover, from 
his philosophy taken in connection with the ideas 
of the prophets, the shoot sprouted forth that was 
destined to develop into a spreading tree, for in 
part Philo's philosophy is the basis of Christianity. 
Not quite so genial was the meeting of Jew and 
Greek at home, in Jerusalem, where a character- 
istic trait displayed itself, which, under changed 
conditions, may be observed to this day : The 
rich Jews knew no dearer aim, cherished no more 
T he ardent desire, than to have their Juda- 

Hellenists ism sink into the background and be 
forgotten, and to mix with the Greeks, assume 
Greek names, imitate Greek depravity and vices, 



JEWISH HISTORY 31 

and frequent the palaces, the palestra, gymna- 
sium, circus, and theatre of the Greeks. The 
line in Lessing's "Nathan the Wise": "The 
rich Jew I never esteemed the better Jew," is 
matched by a remarkable Talmudic utterance: 
"Have a jealous care of the children of the poor, 
for from them goes forth the Law." The rich Jews 
have never done anything to save Judaism. It 
is impossible to calculate what the course of Jew- 
ish development would have been, had the rich of 
Hellenistic days, supported by the aristocratic 
priesthood, carried out their ideas, and had Judaism 
not boasted a small circle of men, who, though 
giving the due meed of admiration to the lofty and 
beautiful features in Greek art and poetry, pre- 
served their faith intact in all its purity. This 
chosen band consisted of the staunch rabbis, who 
developed the fundamental principles of Judaism 
in the Talmud, the work well known by name at 
least. 

The conflict raged between the hostile factions, 
the Sadducees, composed of the priests Antiochus 
and aristocrats, and the Pharisees, con- Epiphanes 
sisting of the doctors of the Law, until a foreign 
conqueror, Antiochus Epiphanes, entered the un- 
happy land, and once more, in 169, subjected it 
to foreign domination. He determined to make 
the Jews feel what a strong ruler is capable of 
doing. Not satisfied with having subdued the 
land, he wounded the Jews in their most sensi- 
tive spot : he forbade them to pay obedience to 
the injunctions of the Law, and desecrated the 



32 JEWISH HISTORY 

Temple by setting up a statue of the Olympian 
Jupiter within its precincts. City after city in 
Palestine was defiled in the same way. Modin, 
the little highland town, was not spared. An 
The 'd Jewish priest lived there, by name 

Maccabees Mattathias. He had never been in 
sympathy with the doings in the capital. The 
aping of strange customs had been a thorn in his 
side. He dared stand up and refuse to sacrifice 
to Jupiter. Another priest proved more docile, 
and Mattathias slew him by the altar smoking from 
the offering brought to the heathen deity. That 
was the signal for a general uprising. Mattathias 
and his five sons organized the rebellion, and, like 
wildfire, the report spread, that a priestly family of 
Modin had had the courage to bid defiance to the 
conqueror. His valiant countrymen dispersed here 
and there gathered under his banner, and a small 
troop of five thousand men, unarmed or inadequately 
equipped, they ranged themselves on the plain of 
Emmaus, under the leadership of Judas Maccabaeus, 
Mattathias' son, opposite to an army of fifty thou- 
sand infantry and ten thousand cavalry, veterans 
who had subdued the most warlike peoples. Yet 
the little band routed the great host. The story of 
Emmaus repeated itself again and again. Barely 
two years later, Judas Maccabaeus, with an army 
of ten thousand, put to flight the Syrian host num- 
bering sixteen thousand infantry and four thou- 
sand riders. In triumph he journeyed to Jerusa- 
lem, purified the Temple, and on the twenty-fifth 
day of Kislew, 165, the sanctuary was rededicated 



JEWISH HISTORY 33 

to its pristine purpose, the service of the one God. 
In commemoration of the event we celebrate the 
Chanukkah festival. 

A wealth of wonders and legends, of tales and 
narratives, of heroes and martyrs, mark the time 
of the Syrian wars, proving anew, that faith, though 
it live in a small, weak nation, can accomplish 
miracles and heroic deeds. Judas the Maccabean 
perished like a hero on the battlefield, and his 
brothers John and Simon assumed the leadership. 
During the next hundred years, the Israelites lived 
by turns under the rule of heroes and of cowards. 
The Maccabean race did not always maintain itself 
upon the heights of moral and physical heroism. 
The third generation, John Hyrcanus and Aris- 
tobulus, had sunk into such pusillanimity, that 
they summoned the foe to help against their own 
brothers. This new foe, another conqueror, mightier 
than any since Alexander the Great, was The 
the Roman nation. Even then a world- Romans in 
power, it was the political authority be- Palestine 
fore which the world, the old and the new, trembled ; 
the victor who knew how to annihilate all nations 
and counteract all military art by crafty politics. 
Pompey entered Jerusalem, but the aim of the cow- 
ardly princes that had invited him thither was not 
realized ; the Romans turned Palestine into a Ro- 
man province. Though under Emperor Augustus 
the Jews were considered citizens, still they were 
dependent upon Rome, and obliged to pay her a 
tribute. The rulers of the Idumaean house, among 
them Herod the Great, multiplied the evils of the 
3 



34 JEWISH HISTORY 

situation. Fifty years after the heroic devotion of 
the Maccabees, not a trace of the old patriotism, the 
old loyalty to the faith, could be found. The men 
whom we venerate to-day as the preservers of Juda- 
ism had to hide themselves in mountain caves, and 
as for Herod's savagery, we know that he had ten 
wives, and that he ordered the execution of three 
of his sons, of his brother-in-law, his brother-in-law's 
mother, and thousands of others. 

Herod died in the year 4 before the common 
era. Three years before his death a son named 
Joshua had been born to the carpenter Joseph in 
Jesus of Nazareth. He was destined to wield 

Nazareth extraordinary influence over the fate 
of the Jewish people, in fact, over that of the 
whole world. But it would be false to suppose 
that the influence was operative in the time we 
are speaking of, or soon after. 

The situation of the Jews in Jerusalem at about 
the beginning of the present era was most wretched. 
Internal dissension had divided the people into 
hostile camps. The aristocratic and the rich were 
arrayed against the priests and the poor. The 
news of the state of affairs in Jerusalem had spread 
to the provinces, and reached the fishermen of 
Galilee. Then probably the idea of bringing help 
to his people flashed into the lofty, enthusiastic 
mind of Joshua. It was not his intention to 
change Judaism ; he wanted to infuse new life 
into the sick body of the Jewish people; he wanted 
to unite the hostile parties ; he wanted to become 
the reformer of his people. He walked in the 



JEWISH HISTORY 35 

ways of Hillel, whose teaching lay before him, 
and what he proclaimed on the public street to 
a people that did not understand him was prac- 
tically the same that his teacher had inculcated a 
hundred years earlier. When one of the Gentiles 
came to the latter, and begged to have the whole 
of the Jewish Law imparted to him while standing 
on one foot, Hillel answered: "Certainly; love thy 
neighbor as thyself. That is the whole of Juda- 
ism." Eighty years later Rabbi Joshua repeated 
the saying, and, if the speeches reported in the 
Gospels are genuine, he added, " On this hangeth 
the whole Law." Assuredly, he was a pious rabbi, 
and unnoticed flowed on the life of him who had 
conceived the sublime idea of reforming Israel. 
Even the rabbis mocked at him, for not like them 
was he learned in the Law. For about a year he 
proclaimed the redemption of the world by the 
Messiah, which, the prophets had foretold, would 
come to pass in a time in which confusion and 
affliction were at their height. In Jerusalem Ro- 
man procurators were stationed, and one day Pon- 
tius Pilate was informed, that a man was going up 
and down in the land preaching revolution against 
Rome, and teaching that temporal power no longer 
had any justification. Pontius Pilate reported the 
facts to the highest court, the Synhedrion, and the 
man was summoned to Jerusalem. All sorts of 
people now joined him, and his progress to the city 
in a measure was a triumphal procession. The 
scene is familiar to all, how, when Joshua of Naza- 
reth stood before the Synhedrion, and Pilate asked 



36 JEWISH HISTORY 

the question : "Art thou the king of the Jews ?" 
he answered: "Thou sayest it." From this it 
appears, that the great thought must have come to 
him before, that he himself was called to be the 
Messiah of his people. Pontius Pilate recognized 
the danger to Rome, and charged the Synhedrion 
to pass judgment upon him. He was nailed to the 
cross a form of execution never used by the Jews. 
Among all the kinds of punishment prescribed by 
the Synhedrion, that of death by crucifixion is not 
to be found. 

Golgotha, the place of skulls, gave birth to a 
tragedy in which the Israelitish people was as- 
signed a calamitous part. Joshua ha-Nozri devel- 
oped into Jesus Christ, whose successors, the apos- 
tles, founded a religion based upon Judaism. Not 
only did they later use every effort to separate the 
new faith from the old, but again and again they 
took hostile measures against the mother religion. 
When it occurred, the portentous event seems to 
have been passed over in silence. The only authors 
of the period, Philo and Josephus, make no mention 
of Jesus the Messiah. In his generation, therefore, 
either no attention was paid to him, or he was re- 
garded as one of the pious prophets, such as proba- 
bly arose in numbers in the Jerusalem of his day. 

Soon afterwards, another tragedy, no less awful 
and sublime, was enacted upon the soil of the Holy 
Land : the siege of Jerusalem and the destruction 
of the Temple ! The city had long been a prey to 
bitter factional strife, when Titus in the year 70 
appeared before its walls with a powerful army. 



JEWISH HISTORY 37 

Then began a life and death struggle, the more 
disastrous as not even to the enemy the inhabi- 
tants of the city presented a united ~ 

J r . Destruction 

front. The various parties the rich of jerusa- 
and the aristocratic priests (Saddu- lemby 
cees), the doctors of the Law (Phari- Tltus 
sees), the military leaders and the Zealots (Ka- 
naim), in short, all the parties that had been at 
feud with each other since generations, or had 
sprung up during the siege even now pursued 
their peculiar aims and interests. The numbers 
involved in the conflict and its entire history are 
amazing. The captives ran up to about ninety- 
seven thousand ; in the neighborhood of twelve 
thousand died of starvation during the siege, and 
the whole number of the victims of the war is com- 
puted at one million one hundred thousand. On 
the Ninth of Ab the Romans cast a firebrand into 
one of the buildings adjacent to the north side of 
the Temple. With the fury of lightning the flames 
spread, and the Romans penetrated into the Tem- 
ple. Soon the whole mount was a great sea of fire, 
and the howls of triumph issuing from the victori- 
ous Romans mingled in curious harmony with the 
lamentations of the defeated Jews. In the last 
chamber of the Temple, six thousand unarmed 
men, who had sought refuge there, were burnt. 

The victors did not escape without serious losses. 
The walls and fortifications of the city and the 
stubborn opposition of its inhabitants had put their 
strength to the severest test. Had it not been for 
tfye old hereditary fault, disunion among the Jews, 



38 JEWISH HISTORY 

who knows how long the army of Vespasian and 
Titus might have had to stand before the walls of 
Jerusalem ! Of the factions at odds with each 
other, the Zealots had been the ones to insist upon 
the continuation of the war until all means were 
exhausted ; the others had been willing to surren- 
der in order to secure mild conditions of peace. 
So Jerusalem finally became the prey of the 
Romans. 

A remarkable narrative has come down to us in 
connection with the catastrophe. When the last 
high priest, standing upon the summit of the 
Temple Mount, saw the legions of Titus rush up 
the hill to the sanctuary of the Lord, realizing that 
the end had come unto Israel and his House, he 
took the golden keys that unlocked the Temple, 
and held them up into the clouds. A hand 
stretched forth from out of the clouds, and grasped 
the keys. This is a legend. But what was in the 
minds of the men who preserved the legend in the 
Talmud ? They meant to indicate, that Israel's 
mission had undergone a transformation ; it was 
no longer linked with the Temple and the land of 
the fathers. His task was now to become what his 
prophets had proclaimed : a witness before the 
nations of the belief in the one God and the eter- 
nal law of morality revealed on Sinai a witness 
unto the truths of Judaism. 

Now the miraculous occurs ! A nation journeys 
forth out of its home, and carries naught with it 
not a grain of the dust of the Holy Land, not a 
pebble to bear testimony to the glory of the Tem- 



JEWISH HISTORY 39 

pie only a book, a single book, its Bible, which 
had been its refuge and tower of strength in happy 
days. It wanders on, across blood, in the midst of 
nations, through tears, and over thrones, the might 
of tyrants and the treachery of hosts of enemies 
encompassing it, always holding aloft the Book. 
The Book supports the people, and braves its fate. 
So it passes out of the Holy Land in quest of a 
new home. 



Ill 

Once more my readers must transport them- 
selves to Jerusalem the old, the soil on which the 
most stirring events of our national history have 
taken place. In the bloody days in which many 
thousands of Jews met death, and the remnant of 
the people went into exile, an event took place 
which at the time probably aroused no notice, but 
which has turned out to have been of determining 
influence in the development of Judaism. Through 
the streets of Zion, the beleaguered city, a funeral 
cortege is moving. Disciples are carrying a be- 
loved teacher to the grave. The procession is per- 
mitted to pass unhindered, for even the Roman 
guards refrain from putting an indignity upon a 
corpse, and so the bier is borne through the 
very city gates unchallenged. The company has 
scarcely gotten beyond the walls of the Jerusalem 
of raging Zealots and despairing peace partisans, 
when the bearers set down their burden, and raise 
the lid of the coffin. Out of it steps an old rabbi : 
jochanan Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai. To ex- 
ben ecute his plan he had been forced to 
Zakkai resort to this subterfuge in order to 
get outside of the city, closely invested by the 
Romans. At the head of his band of disciples, he 
proceeds to the enemy's camp, and presents him- 
self before the Roman commander, Vespasian. 

Impressed by the venerable rabbi's appearance, 
(40) 



JEWISH HISTORY 41 

the general pays heed to him, and being in a good 
humor permits him to prefer a petition. What is 
the rabbi's prayer ? He asks neither that Jerusa- 
lem be spared, nor that the Temple be protected, 
nor that his own family be exempted from harm. 
His one request of the proud Roman emperor is : 
" Let me found a school at Jabne." Astonished 
and not a little contemptuous, the Roman looks at 
the Jew who has no other wish at such a time; yet 
he nods gracious assent. At the head of his disci- 
ples, Jochanan journeys to Jabne, a little town by 
the sea, about thirty miles from Jerusalem. The 
scornful Roman little suspects that Greek museums, 
the pyramids of Egypt, the temples of Rome, and 
the impregnable castles of mediaeval knights will 
have crumbled into dust and ashes, when the Law 
of Jochanan, issuing from Jabne to every corner of 
the earth, will still exist with vitality undiminished. 
Jochanan discerned clearly, that a new era had 
dawned with changed demands; that Israel thence- 
forth would have larger tasks to fulfil. In a time 
in which it seemed that the curse foretelling Is- 
rael's ruin had been realized, he gathered all avail- 
able forces to Jabne. He inculcated the idea that 
the sacrificial cult would have to be abandoned, 
that prayer would have to be substituted for sacri- 
fice, that the Jews had the new mission to go out 
among men, among the nations, to proclaim the 
belief in one God. Jabne gave the impetus to a 
reorganization of Judaism. Without being either 
prince or priest, Jochanan, by reason of his intel- 
lect, his knowledge, his example, exerted a stimu- 



42 JEWISH HISTORY 

lating and vivifying influence upon his disciples 
and upon the fragments of his dispersed people. 
Gamaliel was his true successor in the spirit, the 
first of a line of masters animated by similar ideals 
and gifted with equal force. One of the most en- 
lightened of them and at the same 
time one of the most pious is the 
teacher whose name, Akiba, has a familiar ring in 
the ear of every Jew. 

He, too, considered Israel's mission a spiritual 
one, but the conviction did not prevent him from 
pursuing another aim and cherishing another ideal. 
Jochanan had buried Jerusalem under her own 
ruins, but Akiba did not resign the hope of polit- 
ical and national regeneration. He fondly believed 
that it might still be possible to rebuild the Tem- 
ple, and he became a great political agitator. The 
essential facts of his career, to be sure, have not 
reached our day. Up to his fortieth year he is 
said to have been employed by a wealthy Jew as 
cowherd. His rich employer's daughter, the story 
goes, fell in love with him, but her father would 
not accept him as his son-in-law. Thereupon Akiba 
journeyed to Babylon, and so earnestly devoted 
himself to study that he returned at the end of a 
few years a famous master, to whom Kalba Sebua 
gladly gave his daughter, for she had remained 
faithful to her lover. 

Akiba undertook extensive journeys in the 
interest of his political plans. On one of them he 
met a man whose wonderful beauty and well-pro- 
'portioned, strong frame attracted him. As if lost 



JEWISH HISTORY 43 

in a dream, he looked at him long, and finally ex- 
claimed : "A star has risen in Jacob ! Thou wilt 
be the deliverer, thou wilt be the Messiah." The 
man thus apostrophized was Bar-Kokhba, to whom 
Akiba paid homage as the new king. Bar- 
Bar-Kokhba did not disappoint the Kokhba 
hopes of his admirers. He gathered a great army, 
and entrenched himself in the rock-fortress Bethar, 
the centre of another forlorn struggle against 
Roman supremacy, more relentless than any that 
Rome herself had ever engaged in. Its luridness 
makes even the siege of Jerusalem sink into the 
background. 

For three years the haughty Romans were kept 
before the walls of Bethar, and even then, it is 
said, the fortress fell through treachery. The old 
hereditary enemies of the Jews, the Samaritans, 
betrayed to the alien foe the secret of unguarded 
-entrances. On a Sabbath the Romans poured in 
through the unprotected passages, and Bar-Kokhba 
himself probably met his death in the desperate 
struggle that ensued, for we hear nothing more 
about him. The strength of the nation was laid 
low forever, and Jerusalem ordered to be turned 
into a ploughed field. On the Ninth of Ab, the 
anniversary of its two destructions, a ploughshare 
was drawn over the site of the Temple, and later a 
sanctuary sacred to Jupiter was erected on it. The 
very name of Jerusalem was to be obliterated ; the 
place was to be known as JElia Capitolina. 
Rabbi Akiba was the most distinguished object of 
Hadrian's revenge. He and seven others, or, as 



44 JEWISH HISTORY 

the legend goes, ten martyrs, were executed in an 
open square, having first been subjected to the 
most exquisite tortures. Before his soul left its 
body, Akiba pronounced the confession of faith : 
" Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is 
One !" So he died, but the spirit that has main- 
tained Israel by no means died with him. It 
merely transplanted itself to another soil. In 
Babylonia, in fact, it attained to greater strength 
then ever in Jerusalem. The narrowly national 
history of Israel closes with the tragedy of Bethar, 
the favorite subject of epics, ballads, and dramas. 
Henceforth Israel's history is a history of his suf- 
fering and his persecutions. It no longer concen- 
trates itself upon the soil of one country, for 
Israel becomes a wanderer to the "four corners 
of the earth," in all the habitations of men. 

In reality, the history of the Jews from that 
time on is the history of their literature ; they 
preserve themselves by means of their intellectual 
activity, exercised upon the text-book of their life, 
the Bible. The Bible is the native home of the 
Jew. Without it he would have drifted anchorless ; 
with it every place was home, a refuge hospitably 
open for his reception. 

This mental activity of the Jews, absorbing their 
every force and faculty during a period of hundreds 
The of years, built up the colossal mon- 

Taimud ument called the Talmud, the precipi- 

tate of the work of centuries, representing the 
devoted effort of generations of Jews, under the 
direction of the most eminent masters, especially 



JEWISH HISTORY 45 

of those in Babylonia, where the Jews, enjoying 
social respect, were permitted to lead a free, un- 
restrained life. 

Until the year 500 of the present era, the centre 
of gravity of Judaism lay in Babylonia. But before 
that time, the Jews had wandered far and wide. 
We know that they had settled in Germany. We 
hear of a Jewish bishop of Metz, Simon The 
by name. At the end of the third Diaspora 
century we read of a Jewish congregation at 
Cologne, and at the same time a number of Jewish 
settlements were established at other places along 
the Rhine. Evidence is not lacking, that the Jews 
reached the Rhine before the Teutons, who so 
often, down to our own day, have disputed the 
claim of the former to German citizenship equal to 
their own. And we hear of great Jewish king- 
doms at the "opposite ends" of the earth, in 
southern and northern Arabia. Powerful kings 
reigned there, who by some chance or other ob- 
tained supremacy over all the highland tribes, and 
the conquered accepted Judaism with their rulers. 
Likewise we hear of Jews at that early time settled 
in Spain, and of some in central Arabia. 

In central Arabia they were so highly considered, 
that when one day in Mecca, a man arose, full of the 
desire to systematize and fix in permanent form 
the disjointed ideas upon religion held by the 
Arabs, he sought to enter into relations first with 
the Jews of Mecca, then with those of Medina. 
Finding that the Jews turn. towards the East in 
their synagogues, he advised his 1 ace-brethren to 



46 JEWISH HISTORY 

do the same. The man was Mohammed. He tried 

to win the Jews over to his ideas. He was as 

cunning as fanatic, and the Jews of 

Mohammed .- . . 

the city were on their guard against 
him. With the expenditure of all their strength, 
they had succeeded in preserving their faith, and 
they had no wish to sacrifice it for the vagaries 
of the fanatic enthusiast. Some, however, became 
his followers. Every one knows what success 
attended the propaganda of his fanatic, extrav- 
agant conception of life, appealing peculiarly to 
the fancy and the prejudices of the Arabs. He 
was the founder of Islam. 

The Jews had made themselves part and parcel 
of Arab life. The Jewish contemporaries of Mo- 
TheAra- hammed wrote and composed poetry 
bianjews j n Arabic as good as the Greek of 
the Alexandrian Jews eight hundred years earlier; 
or as the Aramaic of the Babylonian Jews eight 
hundred years before the Alexandrians ; or as the 
Hebrew of the Palestinian Jews eight hundred 
years before the Babylonians. Here we meet with 
one of the chief factors in the success of the Jews 
as agents of civilization. Wherever they went, be 
it to the edge of the desert or into Teutonic lands, 
they founded first, not synagogues or houses of 
prayer, but schools, for they knew, that what alone 
had saved them, dispersed as they were in exile 
lands, was the spirit that came forth out of the 
houses of learning. " On the breath issuing from 
the schools rests the moral order of the universe," 
says the Talmud. 



JEWISH HISTORY 4/ 

The development of the Islam proceeded with 
mighty strides, and its influence extended far and 
wide over the whole Eastern world. When the 
Arabs sat in their tents in the fair summer twi- 
light, we can imagine them telling the legend of a 
man who was the exemplar of hospitality and brav- 
ery. His name was Samuel ben Adijah, and by 
race he was a Jew so respected the Jews were 
shortly after they had made their first permanent 
settlement in Arabia. Among the poems in praise 
of courage and -guestfriendship that have come 
down to us from before the time of Mohammed, 
the favorite one cited by the Arabs was Samuel's 
Kasside. Even among those who spread Moham- 
med's doctrines there were Jewish authors and 
authoresses, some of whose clever epigrams and 
poems have been preserved to this day. They are 
so thoroughly permeated with the spirit of free 
Arabia, that if their successors had not informed 
us of the facts of their lives, we should never have 
suspected the writers to be Jews. 

All this was to change. When Mohammed per- 
ceived, that the Jews were not accepting his leader- 
ship, he ceased to court their favor, and after a 
while he began to persecute them. He wrote the 
twenty-ninth Sura in the Koran, directed against 
the Jews, and forbade his adherents to turn towards 
the East in prayer. 

Israel once more had to experience the antagon- 
ism of a daughter religion. As soon as the Roman 
world-empire had fallen, and Christianity had 
attained to independent power, the crescent and 



48 JEWISH HISTORY 

the cross united to attack and oppress Israel. Per- 
haps this was poor policy on Mohammed's part. 
Christianity was true to itself in pursuing the 
policy. Its very existence rested upon the propo- 
sition that it was the sole vehicle of the truth. If 
this claim was to appear tenable, no Jew could be 
permitted to live, for he would testify against its 
validity. The most insignificant, the most despised 
Jew is a loud witness against Christianity, and there- 
fore he must be wiped from the face of the earth. 

The first emperors that professed Christianity 
followed this course. Constantine was the only 
one to honor the custom of Jew-persecuting more 
in the breach than the observance. Julian the 
Apostate once more dreamed the unrealizable 
dream of the rebuilding of Jerusalem. He informed 
the Jews of his plan, but soon his attempt was 
abandoned. The other emperors, like their German 
successors, and like the Spanish kings and the 
Visigothic rulers, looked towards the one goal, har- 
bored the one wish, to exterminate the Jews. 

They failed, for the stiffnecked Jews were 
animated by a spiritual force incapable of being 
crushed. If the Jews had remained a political en- 
tity, they would doubtless have succumbed to the 
assault of the combined powers of the world. As 
it was, what could the Jews be robbed of ? Their 
spiritual possessions were inalienable. From the 
ashes of every pyre rose in renewed vigor the Jew- 
ish spirit, or, as the enemies said, Jewish defiance, 
that is, the Jewish Law. The monks alone did not 
save the sciences from the surging flood of the 



JEWISH HISTORY 49 

migrations of the peoples ; the Arabs did valiant 
work, and the Jews ably assisted them. Without 
the Arabs and the Jews many sciences science 
might possibly have been submerged among the 
during the dark centuries from the J ews 
death of Jesus to the year 900. Especially astron- 
omy and geometry, medicine, theology, and philos- 
ophy were treated and expounded by the Arabs 
and the Jews of those times, and works on these 
subjects were translated from the Syriac and the 
Greek into Arabic and Hebrew, and so made ac- 
cessible to the scholars of the Occidental world. 

The important role played by the Jews in the 
advancement of civilization in the above epoch has 
not yet been sufficiently appreciated. An old leg- 
end naively says, that the art of healing with all its 
prescriptions and regulations was taught by God 
Himself to Adam in Paradise, and that Father 
Noah carried it with him into the ark. However, 
what the greatest historian of medicine says, that 
the "science of medicine cannot be imagined with- 
out the participation of the Jews," is an historic 
truth. The achievements of the Jews cut a figure 
upon every page of the history of medical science. 
Jews were the teachers of medicine at the first 
universities of Europe, Montpellier and Salerno. 
As early as the ninth century Isaac Israeli wrote a 
treatise on fever. When the physicians of a later 
day consulted the book, they saw to their amaze- 
ment, that modern medicine knows no diagnosis for 
fever other than that recorded by the physician of 
a thousand years ago, living on the edge of the 

4 



50 JEWISH HISTORY 

wilderness. A Jew was the first to study the re- 
fraction of light ; a Jew introduced to Europe the 
famous work of Dioscorides, the foundation of the 
whole science of botany ; a Jew wrote the first text- 
book of geometry in Europe, and other intellectual 
feats performed by Jews will come to light when 
we reach the description of our next period. 

Meantime the Jews had found a new home, which 
received them hospitably, and for some time to 
come permitted them to pursue their vocations 
peaceably and devote themselves to intellectual 
work. The description of this happy era will be 
the subject of our next paper. Before we pass on 
to it, we must give a paragraph to a curious phe- 
nomenon stirring to its depths the Judaism of the 
time we are studying. As often before, a man 
arose among the Jews animated by the desire to 
exert a reforming influence upon Judaism, if the 
expression is permissible. His name was Anan. 
He held the opinion, that much in the Talmud and 
in the religious laws of Judaism had gotten too far 
away from the simple, direct meaning of the bib- 
lical injunctions. "Read the Scriptures " this 
The wa s the watchword that attracted fol- 

Karaites lowers in greater and greater num- 

bers as the feeling spread, that the burden of 
the Law was, indeed, too heavy. They separated 
from the body of the Jews, and called themselves 
Karaites. In the beginning it looked as though 
the new sect would be a menace to Judaism. It 
throve sturdily, and the energetic rebuff of its 
assaults by the great men of Israel is evidence 



JEWISH HISTORY 51 

that they were considered a peril. From the ninth 
to the twelfth century, the sect must have pos- 
sessed real importance. But instead of delivering 
Judaism from a yoke, the avowed aim of the 
Karaites, they would have imposed a new one. If 
they had been successful, the Jews would now be 
groaning under the thraldom of Scriptural literalism 
additional proof that the Talmud was Judaism's 
safeguard against spiritual serfdom; additional 
testimony that in Judaism tradition has never 
ceased to be a living process. The Karaites re- 
belled against the Talmud, and became slaves to 
the letter of the Scriptures. They nowhere at- 
tained to a position of importance. At present 
several hundreds are to be found in the Crimea 
and in southern Russia. Tshufut Kale, a rock 
city, is their centre; they possess a very old ceme- 
tery there. The Russian government has eman- 
cipated them, while the other Jews under its sway 
are languishing in abject misery. In the spiritual 
life of the Jews they have only a very small place ; 
they did no injury to Judaism, but they certainly 
did not promote its welfare. 

Long before the Karaites, Jews lived in Russia ; 
in fact, a great Jewish kingdom once existed there. 
One day the king of the Chazars, for . 

some reason or other, became a con- chazar 
vert to the Jewish faith, and with the Kingdom 
king, Bulan by name, his whole people accepted 
Judaism. In Spain, where the Jews were leading 
happy lives, the rumor of a Jewish kingdom in 
the north spread far and wide. As the hope in the 



52 JEWISH HISTORY 

coming of the Messiah had never been abandoned, 
the Spanish Jews were quick to yield up their 
minds to romantic speculations : Perhaps the king 
of that far-off, unknown land is the Messiah ; per- 
haps he will lead us back to the Holy Land ! One 
of their elect wrote to the king of the Chazars, and 
his letter has come down to us, a mine of informa- 
tion upon a variety of subjects. 

History plays curious tricks with men and 
things ; it follows no fixed laws, and germs sprout 
spontaneously here and there, only to disappear 
as suddenly as they came into sight. A legend 
narrates, that Wladimir Monomachos, Grand Duke 
of Kiew, one day conceived the idea of setting 
aside the old gods. He summoned a Christian 
theologian, a heathen priest, and a Jewish rabbi to 
carry on a disputation before him, so that he might 
decide which religion he and his people were to 
confess. The representative of Christianity won 
the day, else the Russians were Jews ! 

The history of this period, like that of the fore- 
going ones, ends with a remarkable occurrence. 
The Academy at Sora, in Babylonia, was in the 
habit of sending scholars annually to the lands of 
the diaspora to collect funds from wealthy Jews 
for the maintenance of the venerable seat of 
learning. Towards the end of the tenth century, 
four men were sent on this mission. The vessel 
on which the scholars embarked was wrecked. 
Three were saved, and sold as slaves. One drifted 
to Cairo, one to Kairwan, and the third to Spain. 
The second became the founder of the study of 



JEWISH HISTORY 53 

the Talmud in Northern Africa, and the last 
carried to Spain the spiritual treasures inherited 
from centuries of constant intellectual activity, 
and stimulated his Spanish brethren to devote 
themselves to their care and to increase them. 
For, in Spain Israel had found a new home, in 
which the Jews achieved the best they have ever 
contributed to the sum of human civilization. 



IV 

Out of our cold, snowy North, I wish my readers 
to transport themselves to Spain, the sunny land 
of wine and song. Of all the countries of the Euro- 
pean continent, none exercises such charm upon 
the student of mediaeval history. With Jewish life 
it seems to have been connected since ancient days 
by gossamer threads of sympathy, until the bond 
was snapped asunder by religious fanaticism. As 
far back as biblical times, the Israelites had inter- 
course with Spain; witness the prophet Jonah who 
embarked for Tartessus (Tarshish), a little town of 
Spain. They had commercial dealings with the ex- 
treme western European country, and later, after 
the destruction of Jerusalem, no doubt can be enter- 
tained, that many Jews journeyed thither. With the 
Romans surely a large number went to Spain, and 
jews in w * tn ec l ua ^ certainty we may speak 

Visigothic of Jewish settlements under the Visi- 
Spain goths. During the first four centuries, 

the Jews lived in Spain unmolested. So long as the 
Visigoths professed the Arian doctrine, they served 
as soldiers, and were employed in state offices. 
This pleasant aspect of affairs changed with the 
adoption of the Catholic faith by the ruling race. 
The oppression of the Jews began, and a full mea- 
sure of persecution, pain, and misfortune was 
poured out upon them. No more was this a per- 
manent condition. On a sunny July day of the 
(54) 



JEWISH HISTORY 55 

year 711, the situation changed in a trice. It is 
well known how like a windstorm the Islam passed 
not only through the desert, but through all the 
African lands. Not even a century had elapsed 
since its rise, when the new religion had subjected 
northern Africa, and was crossing the narrow strait 
of Gibraltar, separating Africa from Spain. 

In the memorable battle of Xeres de la Frontera 
the Arabs were victorious, and they put to flight 
the Visigoths. Some say, that the Jews were con- 
spicuous in the battle for intrepid deeds ; others 
say, that they acted as the spies of the Arabs, and 
were repaid for their services by Arab favor. In 
either case, a new, happy, prosperous period dawned 
for Spain with the advent of conquering Islam. 

Arabs and Jews working in harmony with each 
other created the most beautiful, the j ews in 
most magnificent civilization produced Moorish 
by the middle ages, and the time glo- Spam 
rifled by their achievements is a favorite subject of 
poet and artist. If the voices of men were silent, 
thousands of stones would speak, and testify unto 
the loveliness of the dwelling together of the two 
races. Under their stimulation, art, poesy, and sci- 
ence began to blossom. At the end of about two 
centuries, Abdur-Rahman III was ruler of the 
whole of Spain ; the crescent was planted in all 
the large cities, in Lucena and in Toledo, in Seville 
and in Granada. This monarch had a Jewish Grand 
Vizier, a minister named Chasdai' ibn Shaprut, the 
previously mentioned writer of the famous letter 
still extant addressed to the king of the Chazars, 



56 JEWISH HISTORY 

and inquiring of him about the great Jewish realm 
in the north, the report of which had reached Spain. 
He was the Caliph's favorite, and wonderful tales 
are told of his statesmanship, his scientific attain- 
ments, his love for Judaism. Twice his skill as a 
diplomat was successfully put to the test. The 
first time he was at the head of a deputation from 
the Caliph to the Byzantine Emperor, and his state- 
craft compassed the desired end. He did not rest 
content with the political victory, for he took with 
him to Europe a book which the world of scholars 
would have missed sorely, had it not been accessi- 
ble to them. It was the work on plants by Dios- 
corides, on which the whole science of botany dur- 
ing the middle ages built itself up. Again he won 
a diplomatic victory. The Caliph wanted to send 
him with a deputation, this time to the German 
Emperor Otto I. It is not known why ChasdaT 
did not accompany the embassy ; none the less his 
art established peace and an alliance between the 
German Emperor and the Caliph on terms that 
earned for him the commendation of both rulers. 
Yet this man, occupying so exalted a place, was a 
loyal, pious Jew ; what is more, a Jew who sup- 
ported and advanced the efforts made in all depart- 
ments of Jewish activity in his day, and nursed 
into life the germs of the science of Judaism. 

The Islam-confessing Arabs were a lucky people 
in the matter of science and art. They had no 
hindering, compelling past. Undisturbed by tra- 
dition, they could pursue their aims with single- 
hearted devotion. Greek they probably did not 



JEWISH HISTORY 57 

know, and of Hebrew they must have been simi- 
larly ignorant, but they believed in an invisible 
God, Creator of heaven and earth. This was the 
teaching Mohammed had accepted from Judaism. 
For the rest, they harbored no prejudice against 
the adherents of other faiths. Their object was 
to oppose heathenism, but towards Judaism and 
Christianity they felt no animosity. It was, there- 
fore, fortunate that they came into mental contact 
with the Jews in the cloudless Spanish period. 
The Jews understood Greek, and in con- j ew s as 
junction with the Arabs, they trans- Translators 
lated the scientific literature of the Greeks and 
Syrians into Arabic, and later, without the collab- 
oration of the Arabs, into Latin. The whole ex- 
tent of the activity of the Jews as translators was 
revealed only a few years ago through the devoted 
industry of a single inquirer, the astonishing result 
of whose scholarship would seem to have required 
the strength and duration of ten lives. The Jew- 
ish translators were a corps of about two hundred 
men, physicians, mathematicians, astronomers, 
philosophers, poets. Their one aim was the trans- 
lation into Arabic of the most prominent works on 
philosophy, on the exact sciences, and on the fine 
arts. In this work the intimacy between Arabs 
and Jews was so close that to this day it costs 
minute research to discover whether the translator 
of a given work was an Arab or a Jew. Very 
often the race of the author was not mentioned, 
unless he did it himself. The most celebrated 
works of poetry preserved in the treasure houses 



J- 



$8 JEWISH HISTORY 

of India, Persia, and Arabia, became known to 
European students only by the mediation of the 
Jews. The modern scholar is right who maintains 
that the root and source of all our romances, 
novels, fables, fairy lore, and ballads, are to be 
sought in the few books, six or eight perhaps, that 
the Arabs and the Jews rescued from oblivion by 
transplanting them to Europe from out of the 
gorgeous splendor of the Orient, the flower-strewn 
meadows of India and Persia. 

Their scientific work is of still higher import- 
ance. The greatest thinker of the ancient Greek 
world, it is universally conceded, was Aristotle. 
His philosophy was destined to dominate the mid- 
dle ages ; he became the sole ruler in the realm of 
Science t ^ ie sc i ence of sciences, and the Jews 

among should always account it a distinction 

the jews t h at they contributed to the establish- 

ment of his power. It is unlikely that the Arabs 
would have been able to familiarize themselves 
with his philosophy, if it had not reached them 
through the medium of the Jewish mind. Strictly 
construed, Arabic philosophy was atheistic, and 
Aristotle's system, a reconciliation of reason with 
religion, could not have obtained currency, had 
Jewish teachers not assumed the task of harmon- 
izing them. The Jews translated Aristotle's 
works and those of other Greek thinkers into 
Arabic. Two hundred years later, when the exi- 
gencies of the times required the change of idiom, 
they put them into Latin. Curiously enough, 
after the golden glory of the Spanish period had 



JEWISH HISTORY 59 

paled, and the grave-like gloom of ignorance and 
mysticism had spread its pall even over the Jewish 
camp, Jewish scholars again arose who translated 
the same works from Latin into Hebrew a re- 
markable play of events and circumstances, of 
absorbing interest to the historian of civilization. 
Similarly, in the field of mathematics, in that of 
astronomy, of medicine, in short, in all the sciences 
known and cultivated at the time, their achieve- 
ments were distinguished and important; in part 
they even did pioneer work. 

For us the most noteworthy feature is that 
the men participating in this work were pious 
Jews. In the Spain of that day, the Jews enjoyed 
equal rights and privileges with the other citizens. 
They participated in jousts and tournaments, 
served in the army, occupied a respected position 
at court, and in the song contests in the Alham- 
bra Jewish poets were among the competitors. 
Yet they remained Jews in spirit, in feeling, in 
faith, in conviction. 

Not only in the secular arts and sciences is 
Jewish endeavor to be credited with brilliant re- 
sults; also in the sphere of Jewish intellectual 
activity it reached heights not scaled since, and 
probably never again to be scaled. Hebrew poetry 
put forth blossom after blossom, and as Neo . 
once on the banks of the Jordan, the Hebrew- 
harp of Zion gave forth sweet, soothing Poetr y 
melody. The three greatest poets were Solomon 
Gabirol, Moses ben Ezra, and Jehuda Halevi. 
Gabirol stands at the beginning of the period of 



60 JEWISH HISTORY 

prolific production, which closes with Jehuda Ha- 
levi, the prince of all its poets, in whom the bril- 
jehuda li ant rays illuminating it converge. He 

Haievi was a popular physician in Saragossa 

and a distinguished philosopher besides. The phil- 
osophic work that he has left us treats soberly and 
sensibly of the agreement between faith and reason. 
Beloved though he was in his city and community, 
he determined, after he had passed his fiftieth year, 
to leave Spain. He gave up his circle of disciples, 
his family, his admirers, in order to end his life in 
Palestine, the land he loved, the object of his in- 
tensest longing. A number of poems composed 
on the journey have been handed down to us ; one 
of the most beautiful is the description of a storm 
at sea. In other scattered poems, he tells of his arri- 
val upon the soil of the Holy Land. Suddenly his 
harp falls silent, and we know nothing of the for- 
tunes of his last days, nor where he died. Busily- 
weaving legend, however, more merciful than his- 
tory, has surrounded his death with the halo of 
poetry. It tells us and if it is not true, it a least 
accords well with his character that arrived at the 
gates of the Holy City, he sang, as he stood ab- 
sorbed in the contemplation of the scene before 
him, his glorious Zion song, repeated to this day, 
on the Ninth of Ab, in the synagogues of all the 
lands on earth. While he was apostrophizing the 
city of his dreams and yearnings, a Saracen rider 
galloped over him, and under the hoofs of the horse 
he breathed forth his soul. A modern poet, Hein- 
rich Heine, has introduced him into Occidental 
literature : 



JEWISH HISTORY 6l 

"Ay, he was a master singer, 
Brilliant pole-star of his age. 
Light and beacon to his people ! 
Wondrous mighty was his singing 

Verily a fiery pillar, 
Moving on 'fore Israel's legions, 
Restless caravan of sorrow, 
Through the exile's desert plain." 

Jehuda Halevi closed the succession of the great 
poets of neo-Hebrew literature, but poetic inspira- 
tion did not die out altogether. In accordance 
with the laws of human development and decline, 
the epoch of great spiritual expansion was followed 
by one of lesser resplendence. Form and color 
were poured out upon it lavishly ; the great themes 
reappeared, but the master minds had vanished 
never to return. In the field of philosophy the 
same phenomenon took place. Here Moses Mai- 
monides was the last of the original inquirers. His 
life and intellectual activity set the seal Moses 
of their inspiration upon the scientific Maimon- 
endeavor that followed. Moreover, ides 
they kindled a stubborn conflict, which had the 
effect of clarifying the convictions of thinkers as 
well as of the nation at large. I should have to 
write many a page, were I to mention only the 
most prominent and important of the men whose 
names are connected with blessed attainment. 

The alliance between Jews and Arabs produced 
on the whole a harmonious public life. In spite 
of some dark spots for collisions occurred between 
them, nor need it be told that the Jews bore the 



62 JEWISH HISTORY 

costs the picture is flooded with sunshine, as long 
as the Arabs were the masters of Spain. Chasdai' 
ibn Shaprut was not the only Jew holding the office 
Samuel f minister to a caliph. Samuel the 

the Prince Prince, for instance, occupied the same 
position. He was a dealer in spices at Malaga. 
Being the only great calligrapher in the city, 
everybody, not excepting the minister, resorted 
to him when a letter was to be written. Some 
of these letters fell into the hands of the Caliph 
Habus, who marvelled not only at their beautiful 
execution, but also at the profundity and charm of 
their contents. He sent for the spice merchant, 
and found him to be a man of extraordinary sagacity 
and experience. The Caliph had him come and 
live in his palace, and Samuel rose higher and 
higher, until he reached the position of counsellor 
to the Caliph. His dazzling fortune did not ban- 
ish his brethren in faith from his mind ; he remained 
a loyal Jew. We have some of his neo-Hebrew 
poems, and we know him to have been an intelli- 
gent promoter of all endeavors calculated to elevate 
Judaism. 

It is impossible to say what course Jewish de- 
velopment would have taken, had the Jews been 
vouchsafed the good fortune of pursu- 

Jews in . , , . . \ 

Christian in g their aims in social, political, and 
Spain intellectual life peaceably and quietly 

in co-operation with the Arabs. For a time it had 
seemed that the old curse pronounced in Leviticus, 
that "the sound of a leaf shaken shall chase them," 
had been removed from the Jews ; almost it had 



JEWISH HISTORY 6$ 

seemed that they were, not accursed, but blessed. 
In a little while, however, political affairs assumed 
an ominous aspect. Masters though the Arabs 
were of Spain, they were not able to eradicate the 
national spirit surviving from former centuries. 
Even when Abdur-Rahman III ruled the whole 
peninsula, the old Christian-Roman attitude of 
mind prevailed, particularly in northern Spain. A 
constant struggle went on between Arabic, Jewish, 
and Christian-Roman culture. But the example of 
tolerance set by the Arab caliphs did not fail to 
work its effect upon the Christian kings, who, step 
by step, recovered Spanish territory from the Arabs. 
Even under Christian dominion, the Jews were tol- 
erated, respected, and to some extent favored. By 
certain incidents we can judge of the happy condi- 
tions that prevailed. Alfonso X, for instance, sent 
for Isaac ibn Sid, the precentor of a synagogue, and 
charged him with the computation of the astro- 
nomical tables to this day bearing the king's name, 
the " Alfonsine Tables." This is but one manifes- 
tation of the cordial relations existing between the 
adherents of the two religions. We might multiply 
indefinitely the number of prominent men who re- 
mained Jews despite high preferment. The Arab 
example, moreover, took effect outside of Spain. 
Frederick II, the German emperor, sent to Spain 
for Jewish scholars in order to have them translate 
celebrated works on art from Greek into Latin, and 
Robert of Anjou and many other princes followed 
suit. This relation, too, was doomed to undergo 
change. The larger the territory gained by Chris- 



64 JEWISH HISTORY 

tianity in Spain, the further the sign of the cres- 
cent had to retreat, the more harassed became the 
condition of the Spanish Jews. 

We have not the details of the intercourse of 
the Jews of Spain with those of northern France 
and Germany. Nor do we know what measures, if 
any, they took to avert the troublous fate of their 
less fortunate brethren. The three centuries from 
the ninth to the twelfth may be considered the 
period during which the Catholic Church arrived 
at the determination to extirpate every vestige of 
Judaism. Naturally, the condition of the Jews in 
the lands under the sway of Rome was abjectly 
The gloomy. What the German Jews suf- 

Crusades fered during the crusades is matter of 
general knowledge ; from Breslau to Mayence the 
road was marked with the blood and strewn with 
the bodies of our ancestors, fathers and mothers, 
the old and the young. No more heartrending 
tragedy than the persecutions that the Jews of 
Germany had to undergo in those days has ever 
been enacted in history. They afford us examples, 
not only of exalted capacity for suffering, but of 
unparalleled heroism. We hear of a father mur- 
dering his own children to save them from forcible 
baptism; of a mother casting her daughters into 
the Rhine rather than expose them to the persecu- 
tion of approaching troops ; of an aged man throw- 
ing a firebrand into a synagogue to preserve it from 
imminent desecration by crusaders. In short, the 
marvels of the martyrdom of the German Jews are 
as little to be exhausted as those of the glory of 



JEWISH HISTORY 6$ 

their Spanish brethren. In 1290 the Jews were 
banished from England, in 1305 from France by 
Philip the Fair, and that they were not p er secu- 
driven out of Germany was due to the tionsofthe 
minute territorial division of the Em- Jews 
pire among numerous rulers. In one place they 
were tolerated because their money could not be 
spared ; in another a prince reigned who needed 
them as agents of various kinds; and in a third 
place the ruler bore with them as the servi camera 
of the Holy Roman Empire. 

Pope Innocent III more than any one man is 
to be held responsible for the unchaining of the 
storms of religious fanaticism against the Jews. 
He enforced the decrees confining them to special 
Jews' quarters, and compelling them to wear long 
black cloaks, three-cornered hats, and yellow 
badges upon their garments, so as to ensure their 
being recognized everywhere as Jews and being 
treated with due contempt. Islam was able to 
accept the existence of Judaism with toleration, 
for it had not begun its course with a bias to which 
it had to conform, regardless of consequences. 
With Christianity the case was different. From 
the first it had proclaimed itself the fulfilment of 
Judaism. If Christianity had indeed superseded 
Judaism, the latter could not be permitted to con- 
tinue. No Jew could be allowed to exist, for his 
presence bore testimony against Christianity. The 
lowliest, the most despised Jew was a living protest 
against the doctrines of the new religion. Only 
from this point of view we may judge of the zeal 
5 



66 JEWISH HISTORY 

for persecution under which Judaism suffered for 
centuries at the hands of popes and emperors, 
princes and bishops, no less than of nations. A 
dark picture, and it makes it only too plain how it 
came about that a people, mercilessly oppressed, 
and chased like a dry leaf from spot to spot all 
over the globe, became narrow in mind and "short 
of spirit." The Jews retired more and more within 
themselves ; ever smaller grew the part they took 
in the joys and sorrows of the nations in whose 
midst they lived, and gradually they confined them- 
selves altogether to the contracted circle of Talmud 
studies. 

By the beginning of the fourteenth century, the 
situation in Spain had developed to the point at 
which the Arabs were retreating fast with no hope 
of retrieving their fortune, and the Christian kings 
were enjoying an uninterrupted succession of vic- 
tories. It is not possible here to describe in detail 
the development of affairs in a country divided up 
among many rulers, as Spain was. Suffice it to 
say that had the Spaniards known gratitude, they 
would have been forced to acknowledge the ser- 
vices of the Jews. Despite the lowering horizon, 
however, the Jews were still taking part in the 
intellectual life of Spain. One king tolerated and 
favored them ; another persecuted and banished 
them. 

The literature of Spain, as might be expected, 
is thoroughly Catholic. Of all literatures it is the 
most religious. If the expression is permissible, 
I should say, that it nestles in the heart of the 



JEWISH HISTORY 67 

Catholic Church. It is filled with the most un- 
questioning reverence for the dogmas of Catholi- 
cism. How curious, then, that Jews j ews i n 
should have sat at the cradle of Span- Spanish 
ish literature. When the Spanish speak Literature 
of their greatest epic, they mean the Cid, well 
known to students of German literature through 
Herder's translation : the Cid is based upon the 
chronicles of a Jew, Ibn Faradsh. A Jew wrote 
the first Spanish romance ; a Jew wrote the first 
Spanish drama, Celestina ; a Jew was the first 
Spanish troubadour, and the last Spanish trouba- 
dour, the tailor (it roper o\ was also a Jew, who 
lived at a time when forced baptisms were the 
order of the day for Jews. 

Romance literature experienced a revival a little 
later, and it is significant that the most important 
poet of the period again was a Jew, a Brazilian by 
birth, Antonio Jose de Silva, whose life Anton i 
offers a signal illustration of the reward jos6 de 
Israel has always reaped from the na- Sllva 
tions of the earth for his spiritual achievements. 
This Antonio lived at the beginning of the eigh- 
teenth century, and was the most distinguished 
poet in the parent land of Portugal where he had 
settled. He was called the second Calderon, for 
he composed some seventy plays, which were per- 
formed at Lisbon before the court. When he 
appeared in the street, the people shouted, "Our 
Antonio ! " His cleverness and his wit endeared 
him to all, and he was one of the most celebrated 
men in Portugal. One day the rumor spread, 



68 JEWISH HISTORY 

that Antonio was a secret Jew; that, in fact, he 
and his brethren in faith met in the cellar of 
his house for divine worship according to the 
Jewish rite. The information reached the Inqui- 
sition, which spared neither person nor rank. He 
had to appear before the dread tribunal, and 
was questioned on the truth of the rumor. Was 
he too proud to deny it, or did he place too much 
confidence in the saving power of his popularity ? 
Be that as it may, he was incarcerated, and con- 
demned to suffer death. One day the aristocratic 
world of Lisbon attended a " first performance:" 
in the open square before the cathedral the great- 
est poet of the land was burnt at the stake. Out 
of the flames, the noble lords and ladies heard 
strange, unintelligible words. Antonio was meet- 
ing death in good Jewish hero and martyr fashion, 
upon his lips the confession of faith : " Hear, O 
Israel, the Lord our God is one!" So died the 
last great dramatist of Romance literature, "the 
Portuguese Plautus." 

We have anticipated the course of events, but 
the end of the great drama of Jewish history 
in Spain is well known. The more widespread 
the influence acquired by the Christian kings, 
the more hopeless became the position of the 
Jews. In the fourteenth century we begin to 
hear of forced conversions and new-Christians, that 
The Mar- is, such as adopted Christianity for one 
ranos or the other reason. The numbers re- 

ported may be exaggerated ; Jewish chroniclers 
estimate them at hundreds of thousands. On one 



JEWISH HISTORY 69 

day, in some city or other, from twenty to thirty 
thousand were forced to submit to baptism ; their 
conviction was not consulted. Naturally these 
forced converts did not immediately give up all 
intercourse with their former coreligionists, nor 
need we be surprised to learn, that many secretly 
held fast to their old faith. The new-Christians 
were the most distinguished victims of the cruelty 
of the Inquisition. Finally the day came, when 
the last and most relentless blow was to be dealt 
the hated Jews. Innocent III in his time had real- 
ized, that if Christianity was ever to obtain com- 
plete sway over Spain, warfare would have to be 
waged against the Jews, who from the first had 
enjoyed respect and power, and had displayed in- 
tellectual strength. The pope's plan was destined 
to succeed in the reign of their Catholic majes- 
ties, Ferdinand and Isabella. With a strong arm, 
Ferdinand had begun the last assault upon the 
Arabs, who had entrenched themselves for the final 
struggle in Granada, their remaining stronghold. 
In 1492 they were dispossessed, and with a last 
sigh, il ultimo sospiro di moro, Boabdil, the last 
Moorish king, attended by a few faithful followers 
the subject of a familiar picture turned his face 
to the Alpuj arras, and from the mosque of Granada 
floated the sign of the cross over the whole of Spain. 
Now came the turn of the Jews. The country 
had been cleared of Arabs, the Jews were to share 
their fate. The Grand Inquisitor Torquemada has 
won the dubious fame of having achieved Jewish 
ruin. He was successful in persuading the king, 



70 JEWISH HISTORY 

still more successful in persuading the queen, 
that oppression and persecution were inadequate 
Expulsion measures, and that Spain would be a 
of the jews Christian country only after the last 
from Spain j ew had been banished from its soil. 
In the same year, 1492, Ferdinand signed the ca- 
lamitous edict by the terms of which all Jews were 
exiled from Spain. The Jews of that time still 
enjoyed respect; intellectually they held a position 
of influence, and many wealthy people, farmers of 
the public revenues and high city officials, were 
among them. These prominent members of the 
race did all in their power to prevent the promul- 
gation of the edict. The negotiations culminated 
in a highly dramatic scene, which has often been 
the theme of painters. A Jewish deputation, at 
whose head is a famous Jewish scholar, stands 
before the royal couple in the palace, and offers 
them thirty thousand ducats to rescind the cruel 
decree. A door opens suddenly, and Torque- 
mada appears on the threshold, bearing a huge 
cross in his arms. "Judas Iscariot," he exclaimed, 
"sold his Master for thirty pieces of silver, and your 
Majesties are about to sell him for thirty thou- 
sand." The fate of the Jews was sealed ; Ferdi- 
nand and Isabella dismissed the deputation. 

On the Ninth of Ab, the ominous day on which 
the Jews had so often suffered woe and misery, 
three hundred thousand Jews left Spain, the beauti- 
ful land in which they had lived unmolested for 
more than five hundred years, and which they 
had enriched with a succession of distinguished 



JEWISH HISTORY 7 1 

thinkers, poets, and statesmen, as well as with its 
first and its last troubadour. Their possessions, 
with the exception of their gold and silver, they 
were permitted to carry with them. Precipi- 
tately they had to dispose of their real estate, 
and then they left with what they could save from 
the wreck. The rabbis, it is reported, ordered 
cymbals and trumpets to be sounded at the head of 
the column of exiles from each town, to drown the 
cries, and sobs, and groans of the many thousands 
that had to leave their home and knew not whither 
to turn. 

The banishment of the Jews from Spain is the 
closing scene of a tragedy. By a remarkable train 
of circumstances, by the irony of history, one is 
tempted to say, it happened that on the very day 
on which the Jews were compelled to leave Spain, 
a Christian, Christopher Columbus, left the Spanish 
land to discover a new world. His expedition was 
equipped with the money confiscated from the 
exiled Jews ; the physician accompanying the little 
fleet was a Jew ; a Jewish sailor is said to have 
been the first to sight land ; a Jew was the first to 
establish a settlement on the hospitable shores 
of America. 

The workings of a divine Providence can be 
traced at every step in the history of the world 
and in the history of Judaism this is the sublime, 
uplifting lesson that forces itself upon the con- 
sideration of all who open the annals of history, 
and follow up the sufferings, the wanderings, and 
the sorrows of our people from century to century. 



The banishment of the Jews from Spain, the 
grand finale of the fourth period of Jewish history, 
was an event of decisive importance for the whole 
of Jewry. In no land had the position of the Jews 
been so remarkable as in Spain. There it had pre- 
sented the rare union of civil and social eminence 
with loyalty and self-forgetful devotion to Judaism. 
The Jewish mind had not experienced a similar 
period of efflorescence since the days of the Baby- 
lonian Academies, or since the fullest expansion of 
national life in Palestine, and I fear that there is 
no hope of another like it. It is, therefore, natural 
that the blow that felled to the ground the Jews of 
Spain should have reacted upon Judaism as a whole. 
The The three hundred thousand Jews who 

Spanish had to leave Spain on the Ninth of Ab, 

Exiles 1492, were scattered through all the 

European countries, and of necessity introduced 
new currents of thought into the spiritual life of 
their brethren long settled there. As for their 
material treasures, they, too, were scattered, and 
soon had disappeared. As I said before, they were 
permitted to carry away with them only a small 
part of their possessions ; still, the fortunes they 
rescued from confiscation are estimated at high 
figures. However great they might have been, 
their needs absorbed all in a short time. Only a 
few reached the countries offering them a refuge 
(72) 



JEWISH HISTORY 73 

as wealthy men. But possessions of other kinds 
the Jews brought : first, their unusual experiences ; 
second, an abundant store of scientific knowledge, 
which they had won in Spain, and in the promotion 
of which they had done valiant service ; and third, 
the valuable social culture they had acquired. 

There remained in Spain a considerable por- 
tion of the people, those mentioned before who 
either defiantly or willingly had submitted to the 
order of things, and had accepted Christianity. 
They were called pseudo-Christians, The 
or Marranos. Their number has prob- Marranos 
ably been exaggerated by historians, Jewish and 
Christian, who estimate it at hundreds of thou- 
sands. It happened, to be sure, that in one city, 
on one day, ten, fifteen, and, on one occasion, pos- 
sibly twenty thousand Jews were forced to accept 
Christianity ; but these figures should be used with 
caution. The condition of the Spanish Marranos 
was much sadder than that of the Jews before 
their banishment. That they had yielded to bap- 
tism under compulsion was not forgotten ; they 
were not credited with sincerity, and in the eyes 
of the world remained Jews to the end of the chap- 
ter. Still the Marranos succeeded in working 
their way into prominent places, as was only natu- 
ral. Spain had deprived herself of so large a num- 
ber of useful citizens, that the loss had to be made 
good in some fairly acceptable way, if the state 
machinery was to continue in smooth operation. 
The Marranos moved into the places vacated by 
the exiled Jews, and at the end of a century the 



74 JEWISH HISTORY 

highest offices were filled by them. They were 
the ministers and the professors, and the whole of 
the Spanish nobility, to use the expression of a 
Spanish poet, was "Judaized," inoculated with 
Jewish blood. In fact, some of the most zealous 
agents of the Inquisition were apostate Jews ; 
even the names of Jewish Inquisitors and Grand 
Inquisitors are recorded in the annals of Jewish 
history. The importance of the Marranos in pub- 
lic life is aptly characterized by a cleverly invented 
anecdote, ascribed to the Marquis de Pombal, min- 
ister to the king of Portugal, who had imitated his 
cousin of Spain in banishing the Jews from his 
realm. One day, the king of Portugal, whose coun- 
sellors had probably reported to him that the neo- 
Christians were usurping the choice places in the 
state, and were working harm to the public weal, 
published a rescript ordering all Marranos to wear 
a yellow hat as a badge. The next day, his minister 
Pombal appeared before him with three yellow hats, 
and when the king asked him, for whom the first 
was intended, he answered : " For myself, your 
Majesty." " And for whom is the second ? " asked 
the king. " For your Majesty's Grand Inquisitor." 
44 And who is to wear the third hat ? " " Your 
Majesty." To so great an extent was the blood of 
Spain and Portugal mixed with Jewish blood. 

The countries in which the Jewish exiles settled 
at once were Brazil, North Africa, Italy, Holland, 
Turkey, and Poland. The consequences for Spain 
were such as a study of political economy and 
history might lead one to expect. From the day 



JEWISH HISTORY 75 

it rid itself of its Jews, the land whose king had 
once been monarch of the civilized world began to 
sink, until it fell to the position of a power of 
the second or third rank through the indolence 
and impotence of its rulers. To this day it has 
not recovered from the self-inflicted blow. The 
lands offering an asylum to the Jews derived cor- 
responding benefit from their presence, showing 
itself partly at once, partly in the course of time, 
and calculable by years and in coin. 

While the fate of the Spanish Jews was working 
itself out, a new time was dawning. Among all 
the movements that have stirred and advanced the 
spiritual life of humanity, two in particular rouse 
our lively interest and absorb our attention when- 
ever we open the book of history. The The Rena i s . 
Renaissance in Italy and Humanism in sance and 
Germany close the middle ages, and Humanism 
conjure up the new time. The Renaissance first 
broke the power of the Church in Italy, loosing the 
fetters of servitude and fanaticism from the minds 
of men, raising them to the height of human 
dignity, and proclaiming liberty of knowledge for 
all the sons of earth. A series of stimulating 
events, material and spiritual, form the introduction 
to the new era : The discovery of America en- 
larged the horizon of men ; inventions and discov- 
eries opened a vista of unnumbered possibilities ; 
gunpowder destroyed the feudal castles of the 
knights of chivalry ; the art of printing lent wings 
to human thought ; the Copernican system taught 
a new view of nature ; and finally came the Refor- 



76 JEWISH HISTORY 

mation, purging and elevating religious thought. 
It is our boast, that Jews had a share in all the new 
activities. In general, no intellectual movement of 
importance has been urged down to the present 
day, in which Jews have failed to take the part of 
pioneers and promoters. 

When the Renaissance exhumed the world of 
classic antiquity, bringing to the light of day the 
treasures of Hellas buried under the mould of 
monasteries, the Bible incidentally stepped into its 
rightful inheritance, and when Humanism cleansed 
Christianity of the dross attaching to it, Jewish 
antiquity again succeeded to the enjoyment of its 
due. The leaders of the Italian Renaissance were 
the disciples of Jewish teachers, and the Humanists 
threaded their way through antiquity at the hands 
of Jewish rabbis and instructors. In his youth 
Martin Luther had seen the Bible chained in the 
monastery at Erfurt. The reading of the book 
was deemed a crime in the Catholic Church ; only 
the prelates and the high dignitaries were per- 
mitted to use it. Martin Luther struck off the 
chain, and restored the Bible to the German people 
a spiritual achievement of immortal worth, sur- 
passing all else he did. But it should not be forgot- 
ten, that Martin Luther followed in the footsteps of 
an erudite Rabbi, whom the older generation of 
Jews remember from school studies and from his 
authoritative influence upon their religious thought. 
Rashi (Solomon ben Isaac) was his name, one of 
the most prominent of the Bible commentators of 
the middle ages, who won distinguished fame by 



JEWISH HISTORY J7 

the simplicity, directness, and clearness of his 
method of explaining the Bible. Two hundred 
years after his death his work was used by a Fran- 
ciscan monk, Nicholas de Lyra, whose annotations 
of the Bible for Christian communities became 
the basis for Luther's Bible translation. It is not 
going too far, then, to say, that without Rashi 
Luther can scarcely be imagined another proof 
of the interaction of spiritual agencies among 
different nations, which fanaticism, superstition, 
and mistrust have not been able to interrupt or 
trammel. Martin Luther was friendly towards the 
Jews in the days of his youth. He advocated 
their cause warmly, and cautioned the German 
nobility against persecuting and oppressing them. 
In later life, after he had passed through the 
saddening experiences growing out of his great 
work of the Reformation, never more than half 
finished, his feelings underwent a change, and in 
his declining years he became a bitter opponent of 
the Jews. 

Very different in this respect was the course of 
another promulgator of the new faith, the early 
champion of the ideas applied by Luther, John 
Reuchlin, "Germania's phoenix," as he was proudly 
called, one of the noblest and most liberal minds of 
the German nation. Early in life he had devoted 
himself, like the heroes of the Italian Renaissance, 
to the study of Jewish antiquity, and like them had 
interested himself with peculiar sympathy in one 
Jewish movement in particular. During the last 
centuries of the Spanish-Jewish era, when the 



78 JEWISH HISTORY 

freedom of the intellectual life was hampered, the 
prodigious development to which philosophy had 
attained among the Jews was arrested by an antago- 
nistic force, which, to the hurt of Judaism, made 
itself supreme, and remained dominant in the 
The following centuries. The new power 

Kabbala was the Kabbala. Dropping weary 

and fatigued from the regions of abstract thought 
to which it had soared, the Jewish mind was 
floundering in the mazy depths of mysticism. It 
pondered on the problems of human life and of 
the world of phenomena in a way far removed 
from the rational speculations of true philosophy. 
The movement had not sprung up over night. In 
general, spiritual agencies are slow in gathering 
force, though usually they assert their fully devel- 
oped strength unexpectedly and in places remote 
from those in which their first germs were planted. 
So the mystic movement seems to have leaped to 
maturity at a bound ; suddenly Jewish life was 
overgrown by it, and all other spiritual endeavor 
pushed into the background. The historian has 
nothing more to do than state the existence of the 
movement ; the psychologist must be appealed to, 
if we are curious to know, why Christians as well 
as Jews were drawn to the mystic view of life. 
The enlightened leaders of the Renaissance and 
the Humanist chiefs in Germany alike studied 
Kabbalistic works. Reuchlin was no exception, 
and his enthusiastic admiration for Judaism grew, 
the better he became acquainted with the Jews 
and the spiritual treasures amassed by them in 
every department. 



JEWISH HISTORY 79- 

Even while Reuchlin's importance was gaining 
widespread recognition, a movement arose among 
the opponents of Humanism aiming at the humilia- 
tion of the Humanists and thereby at The pfef _ 
the downfall of the Jews. A Domin- ferkorn 
ican, Jacob von Hoogstraten, was the Episode 
promoter of the movement, and his mentor is said 
to have been an apostate from Judaism, Pfeffer- 
korn by name, one of the first of the succession 
of apostate Jews who brought woe and misery 
upon their former coreligionists. The matter 
came before the Diet and Emperor Maximilian I. 
Heavy artillery was brought into requisition by 
the Dominicans. They tried to prove that cer- 
tain malevolent rules of conduct appeared in the 
sacred books of the Jews; they asserted that in 
the course of one of their prayers the Jews spit 
out in scorn of the other nations, and deliver 
them over to shame and death, and that at the 
Passover they use the blood of Christian children 
in the preparation of the unleavened bread. They 
enumerated the whole long list of aspersions and 
lies that have since been adduced whenever the 
ruin of the Jews has been contemplated. Then 
Reuchlin stepped forth, the man of courage, not 
intimidated by the reproach "Jew servant," not 
silenced by the rumor that he had been bought 
with Jewish money. He brought his whole appa- 
ratus of scholarship, acquired through years of 
labor and application, to bear upon the demonstra- 
tion of the malice and scurrility of the calumnies. 
Again the Jews were saved. The decree ordering 



80 JEWISH HISTORY 

the burning of the Talmud was recalled, and 
Reuchlin was victorious over the obscurantists. 
The quarrel dragged its slow length along, until 
at last, long after Reuchlin' s death, as all readers 
of history know, the Humanists vanquished the 
enemies of "sweetness and light. " The end was 
that the bold Austin friar ventured to nail his 
ninety-five theses on the church door of Witten- 
berg, and so brought about a complete revolution 
in religious thought. 

The material condition of the Jews in the time 
when they were the teachers of the prominent 
leaders of the Renaissance and of Humanism, as 
well as of cardinals and popes, was most woe-be- 
gone. The sunlight of the new time was glorify- 
ing the world, but to the Jew each day brought a 
renewal of oppression and persecution, so that the 
"tribes of the wandering foot" never dared lay 
aside their staff. 

When they were seeking new sojourning places, 
the countries named above, especially Turkey, 
Holland, and Poland, were the first to offer them 
permanent refuges. Sultan Bajazed, on being told 
that Ferdinand had banished the Jews from the 
Spanish lands, is said to have exclaimed: "And 
you call this king wise, who has deprived himself of 
his best subjects ?" He did not fail to execute the 
policy suggested as the correct one in his rebuke, 
The Jews for Turkey was opened wide for the re- 
in Turkey ceptionof the Jews. There they have 
never had to suffer severe oppression. Within a 
few decades of their settlement in Turkey, we 



JEWISH HISTORY 8 1 

hear of the Sultan's Jewish physician-in-ordinary, 
Moses Hamon, an energetic and sagacious pro- 
moter of spiritual endeavors= Among the first 
works issuing from the printing press this, too, 
is characteristic of the intellectual constitution of 
the Jews were Jewish books, one of them a He- 
brew Bible published by Jews. The first Hebrew 
printing presses were set up in Italy and Turkey. 
Less than a century after the Jews had settled 
peaceably in Turkey, they produced a succession 
of distinguished men who enjoyed the dignities 
and the respect the Jews in Spain had Don 
possessed. One of them was a forci- Joseph 
bly baptized Jew a Marrano, who had Nassi 
escaped from Portugal in his youth. With the rem- 
nants of his fortune Don Joseph Nassi founded a 
banking house in Antwerp, and when fortune re- 
fused to smile on him, he went to Turkey, where 
he rose to high estate. At the same time, his 
aunt, Donna Gracia Mendesia, came by way of 
Venice and other places from Portugal to Turkey. 
Her daughter Reyna was celebrated for wit and 
beauty, and it was natural that she and Don 
Joseph should become a pair. Such honors were 
showered upon them that, were it not attested by 
history beyond a doubt, their good fortune would 
be deemed impossible in days the saddest of the 
middle ages for the Jews, when hundreds of them 
were daily being led to the slaughter in Germany, 
and hundreds were languishing under the tortures 
of the Inquisition in Spain. In such times Sultan 
Selim II made the Jew Joseph Nassi duke of Naxos 
6 



82 JEWISH HISTORY 

in return for his diplomatic services, and it seems 
certain that he was prevented by death alone from 
making him king of Cyprus, as he had intended. 
Joseph's influence as a diplomat was so powerful, 
that on one occasion he restored peace among 
the most important of the European powers, and 
though the French government objected to the 
intervention of a Jew in the affairs of the Christian 
nations, and intrigued against him at the Porte, 
the Sultan upheld and strengthened him in his 
position. In spite of the honored place occupied 
by him in the world of European politics, Don 
Joseph Nassi never swerved from his faith. He 
supported every Jewish endeavor, and promoted 
the science of Judaism. We have coins struck in 
his honor and in the honor of his mother-in-law, 
both of whom are given most extravagant praise 
for their patronage of all things Jewish. 

At the time when Joseph Nassi was at the height 
of his glory, a little Jew lived in Constantinople, 
Solomon the physician Solomon Ashkenasi, who 

Ashkenasi later rose to almost as exalted a place 
as Nassi's. The Sultan appointed him the diplo- 
matic representative of Turkey at Venice, then 
mistress on land and sea, the most puissant of 
European governments. Despite intrigues and 
opposition, he maintained himself at his post for 
over twenty years. The Jews of Venice were con- 
fined (1516) in a Jews' quarter, the Ghetto; under 
the potent influence of the Jesuits, the new order, 
Italy began to pollute herself with the persecu- 
tions until then characteristic only of Spam and 



JEWISH HISTORY 83 

Germany ; the papal censor was occupied in muti- 
lating, in some cases in destroying, the recently 
printed copies of the Talmud ; and in the palace 
next to that of the doges resided the Jew, Solomon 
Ashkenasi, as the respected representative of the 
Porte. When the European powers were passing 
through one of their periodic paroxysms, this time 
on account of the succession to the Polish throne, 
coveted by France for Henry of Anjou, by Austria 
for the Archduke Maximilian, and by Poland for 
the Polish Count Potocki, Solomon Ashkenasi's 
sagacity brought about the election of Henry of 
Anjou, the candidate most likely to re-establish 
the prosperity of unhappy Poland. A letter of his 
has come down to us, addressed to a correspondent 
in Poland, in which he says: "The Bishop of Acre 
will probably claim the credit for himself, but you 
know that it was I who decided the contest about 
the Polish crown." 

In Holland the situation of the Jews was 
equally favorable. At the end of the The jews in 
sixteenth century a vessel destined for Holland 
another port accidentally put in at the Emden 
harbor. Moses Phoebus, one of the small colony of 
Jews at Emden, begged the new arrivals not to 
remain there, but to proceed to Holland, a liberal 
country and open to the Jews ; he was willing to go 
with them, he said. The men so led to Amsterdam 
were the founders of the name and fame of its 
great congregation, of which Moses Phoebus became 
the first rabbi. He boasted of having received 
back into Judaism over twenty thousand Marranos, 



84 JEWISH HISTORY 

refugees from Spain. Barely fifty years after their 
arrival in Amsterdam, the Jews occupied the re- 
spected position always attained by them, wher- 
ever air and sunlight are not denied them. 

Among the Marranos was the family Espinosa, 
whose son Baruch was a pupil at the Talmud Torah 
Benedict school of Amsterdam. The instruction 
Spinoza given at the Jewish institution did not 

satisfy his ambition. He was lured away by the 
spirit of the new time, which pervaded the Hol- 
land of his day. The path he chose was broad and 
long, leading him further and further away from 
the ideas and teachings of the old Beth ha-Midrash> 
until he, Benedict Spinoza, originated a new view 
of life, a new philosophical system. He was not 
the only person of note produced by the Marranos 
of Holland : there were poets and thinkers, dip- 
lomats, officers, warriors valiant in the service of 
their country, and distinguished women, who cut 
a figure in society. One of the most interesting 
members of the Dutch -Portuguese colony was 
Manasseh Manasseh ben Israel, who enjoyed 
ben Israel intimate intercourse with the most 
prominent Dutch scholars, and maintained a cor- 
respondence with the queen of Sweden, urging her 
to grant Jews the freedom of her country. He 
turned his attention also to England, whence the 
Jews had been banished since 1290. In a charac- 
teristic letter, which we still possess, addressed to 
Cromwell, he acquaints the Protector of the Com- 
monwealth with the state of the Jews in various 
countries, and with the advantages sure to accrue to 



JEWISH HISTORY 85 

England, if she received Jews as citizens. He was 
invited to appear before Parliament to present his 
case in person. From that day the movement 
dates ending in the resettlement of the Jews in 
England, the country in which they have since 
lived unmolested as respected citizens. 

Now as to. the third country, Poland. There, 
too, the state of affairs was most favorable to the 
Jews. Poland lacked a middle class; The jews 
its population consisted of nobles and in Poland 
peasants only. By nature the Jews are represent- 
atives of the middle class of society, mediators 
between the nobility and the peasantry. As early 
as the beginning of the sixteenth century, the 
Primate of Poland complained that at the schools 
Jewish pupils were sitting next to Christian chil- 
dren upon the selfsame benches, and that Jewish 
parents were sending their sons to Padua and 
Bologna to study medicine. The enlightened 
monarchs of Poland employed Jewish diplomats in 
the capacity of chancellors, as their most intimate 
advisers. In short, the condition of the Jews in 
Poland was most satisfactory in those days, and 
without a doubt Judaism would have attained to 
noble achievement on Polish soil, had not the un- 
fortunate Cossack rebellion under the leadership 
of Bogdan Chmelnizky proved a catastrophe for 
the Jews. It is said, that when Chmelnizky had 
been captain of the Cossacks, he had been de- 
ceived by a Jew. According to another report, 
his hatred of Jews arose from their having been 
the f ramers of all the taxes, the payment of which 



86 JEWISH HISTORY 

he probably resisted. At all events, against the 
Jews his hatred was more virulent even than 
against the Poles. For three years, from 1648 to 
165 1, wholesale massacres were enacted, and trust- 
worthy chroniclers report that between Wilna 
and Lemberg, over a quarter of a million of Jews 
were butchered amid the most horrible tortures. 
It was long before the Jews recovered from the 
wounds inflicted by the Cossack rebellion. Many 
of them emigrated, and so it happened, that the 
Jews once expelled from Germany returned thither. 

The intellectual development of the Jews in 
Poland was neither normal nor healthy ; the social 
oppression they suffered quenched the light of 
science. The Kabbala had taken all minds cap- 
tive, and persecution, cutting off contact with 
outer influences, had induced concentration of all 
powers upon the study of the Talmud. So ex- 
traordinary an endowment of intelligence and 
intellect as that of the Polish Jews, devoted to 
a single field, necessarily led to mental stagnation 
and ossification. 

We now approach the movement most character- 
istic of the period of Jewish history under con- 
The sideration. At the very time when a 

Sabbatians Baruch Spinoza was setting forth phil- 
osophic ideas so profound that their elaboration 
still gives employment to scholars and thinkers, 
his brethren in Turkey, in the whole of the Orient 
in fact, as well as in Germany and Poland, were 
taken captive, mind and heart, by an advent- 
urer, whose charm lay in nothing more than his 



JEWISH HISTORY 87 

address and his beauty. His name was Sabbatai 
Zevi, and he was born at Smyrna in 1626. It is 
not known what qualities the man possessed en- 
abling him to deceive the distrustful, cautious, 
prudent Jews for nearly half a century ; but it is 
certain that he started a movement fraught with 
dire consequences for Judaism. 

In his twentieth year, Sabbatai had cast off his 
second wife. He lived at a time when the advent 
of the Messiah was daily looked forward to with 
yearning. Cunning deceivers took advantage of 
the strong emotion of the Jews. Some asserted, 
that the Messiah would come in 1635, anc * gather 
the Jews unto Palestine; others predicted redemp- 
tion for another year. When Sabbatai made his 
appearance, the people were prepared to hail him 
as the Messiah come to redeem the Jews. At the 
head of his followers, he went straight to Jerusa- 
lem. On the soil of the Holy Land, his pretensions 
to the Messiahship would certainly be vindicated or 
invalidated. He married a third wife, Sarah, who 
had had a most singular career. During the con- 
fusion of the Cossack rebellion, she had been put, 
as a child of six years of age, into a Polish nunnery, 
and had been forced to accept baptism. Later 
she escaped, and the Jews found her one morning 
in the Jewish cemetery. They took her under 
their care, and Sarah returned to the faith of her 
fathers. After various adventures and journey- 
ings, she came by way of Frankfort on the Main 
and Leghorn to Smyrna. Sabbatai and Sarah were 
accompanied by an army of deceived deceivers, 



88 JEWISH HISTORY 

enthusiasts and impostors, and not a few honest 
believers in his Messianic mission as redeemer. 
The procession wended its way through European 
lands, finally reaching Turkey. So greatly had the 
number of his train increased by new accessions, 
even of very pious Jews, that the Grand Vizier of 
the Porte took fright, and cited Sabbatai before 
his tribunal. In his cunning way he succeeded in 
making it plain to the Vizier, that no sort of danger 
threatened the Porte; that his one object was to 
gather together the Jews from all the countries of 
the world and lead them back to Palestine, where a 
new Jerusalem awaited them. The Sultan, however, 
refused to give him credence. He was confined 
in the tower at Abydos, the "Tower of Strength, ,, 
as it was called by his adherents, who surrounded 
it for weeks and months. One day they noticed 
Turkish guards of honor take Sabbatai Zevi from 
his prison, and escort him to Constantinople. He 
had discovered a way out of his difficulties. Be- 
lieving that his game was over, or that he would 
be enabling himself to play a role on another stage, 
he had accepted Islam. But the popular movement 
once set afoot could not be restrained. The report 
spread, that not Sabbatai, only his phantom double, 
had turned Mohammedan. So he resumed his place 
at the head of his Jewish followers. Never had he 
been more recklessly audacious than at the time 
when he stood revealed a deceiver. The decrees 
issued by him in those days close with the words : 
" I, your God, Sabbatai Zevi !" However, he found 
it impossible to retain the old respected position 



JEWISH HISTORY 89 

for any length of time. After his death, which 
occurred in Turkey, the movement assumed greater 
proportions than ever before. Almost in every 
decade a new Sabbatian adventurer arose, the 
most dangerous of all in Poland. 

There a community of Sabbatians existed as late 
as the middle of the last century, when fresh life 
was infused into it by the appearance The 
of a new prophet, Jacob Frank, who Frankists 
faithfully imitated the course of his ideal. He, too, 
put upon his banner the inscription : "Against the 
Talmud and for Sabbatai Zevi! " This watchword 
naturally enlisted the lively sympathy of the Cath- 
olic clergy of Poland. Frank was deprived of his 
liberty; he, too, bought freedom by the acceptance 
of Christianity, and no less than Sabbatai lost all 
influence by his cowardly apostasy. The adher- 
ents of the Sabbatian movement became stubborn 
in the degree in which they were threatened with 
dangers by the secular authorities or the other 
Jews. In Poland they exist in small numbers to 
this day, under the name Frankists, the last rem- 
nants of a disastrous movement that split Judaism 
into two or three camps, and stunted every ideal 
endeavor. Even the Jews of Germany, who en- 
joyed a higher degree of culture than those in 
Poland and the East, took part in it, and great 
rabbis, deceived by the pretenders, advocated it 
with enthusiasm, explicable only on the assump- 
tion that it surpassed their reason in strength. 

The condition of the Jews in Germany cannot, 
like that of the Jews in Holland and other countries, 



90 JEWISH HISTORY 

be sketched in a few words. German territory was 
split up into minute divisions, each with its own 
The Jews in ruler. If the Jew Lippold in Berlin, 
Germany or the Jew Suss in Wiirtemberg suc- 
ceeded in temporarily bettering the affairs of their 
coreligionists in their respective homes, that had 
no bearing upon the fortunes of the Jews else- 
where. In fact, they were banished from Berlin 
itself, returning thither after a century, as in so 
many cases, only in consequence of their misfor- 
tunes in another country, viz., in Austria. At the 
instance of his wife, Emperor Leopold I exiled 
them; in the year 1670 they had to leave Vienna. 
Three of the Viennese exiles, Benedict Veit, Abra- 
ham Lazarus, and Abraham Riess, went to Berlin 
to petition the Great Elector to throw open his 
dominions to the Jews. Frederick William, the 
enlightened monarch, granted their request, and 
in the next year seventy respected families, some 
of whose descendants still live there, moved to 
Berlin. Prussia had become a refuge of toleration 
and of religious liberty, the corner-stone upon 
which her greatness is built, which was soon to 
become the common heritage of all the nations. 
In 1671, then, the Jews again took up their abode 
in Berlin, and in 17 14 the first public synagogue, 
the one in the Heidereutergasse y was solemnly de- 
dicated in the presence of the king. 

This brings us to the threshold of the modern 
epoch, the last period of our history. Let us take 
another backward glance at the condition of the 
Jews in the closing years of our fifth period. The 



JEWISH HISTORY 91 

picture is extremely sad, unillumined by a single 
ray of light. The traveller that would have chosen 
to make a tour of the Ghettos of Europe, from 
Constantinople by way of Warsaw to Frankfort and 
Leghorn, even to Rome, might have seen sights of 
unparalleled gloom. It is hardly credi- De grada- 
ble, that the descendants of the old tionofthe 
Maccabees, after having bid defiance J ews 
to all persecutions and the efforts of centuries to 
crush the Jewish nation, should have sunk so low, 
become so degraded in carriage and language, so 
uncouth in habit and mind. At no point in the 
whole course of Jewish history do we meet with 
such degeneration as in the middle of the last 
century. 

So lamentably had they deteriorated, that Jews 
organized bandit companies, and rendered the roads 
unsafe. Was it possible, that a race dowered with 
intelligence, culture, and talent to produce a long 
line of celebrated poets and thinkers for the good 
of mankind, had so declined in language and life ? 
The fact proves the possibility. But out of the 
lowest depth of degradation it was to be rescued 
by a movement, unequalled in force, which was to 
breathe new life into Judaism, and remind its ad- 
herents of the old mission repeated again and again 
in the Bible under manifold figures of speech, that 
Israel is called to be the witness of divine truth 
before all nations, and is to live as befits such a 
witness unto the end of all days, until the fate of the 
peoples of the earth shall have worked itself out. 

If, then, Jewish history be studied closely and 



92 JEWISH HISTORY 

with prophetic insight, we shall discover in it that 
which will renew and confirm our stubborn loyalty 
and justify the steadfastness of our faith in the 
realization of the ideals of Judaism. Our loyalty 
is rooted in the conviction that the ideals that 
transfigure our life have not yet been accepted by 
mankind. Even in our day the two great religious 
currents of which we have repeatedly had occasion 
to speak in these papers are flowing through the 
world in hostile separateness. So long as they do 
not mingle their waters, Israel's task is not accom- 
plished. How the two views of life clash, the 
calendar often gives us the opportunity of observ- 
ing in a curious way. Have my readers noticed in 
passing a Jewish house on many a winter evening 
the gleam of two sorts of lights ? On the one side 
burn the Chanukkah candles, on the other, the 
lights of the Christmas tree the ones the sym- 
bols of loyalty, the others, when shining forth from 
a Jewish house, the signs of thoughtlessness and 
faithlessness. Let us hold fast to the Chanukkah 
lights. They stand for unshaken faith in the 
ideals of Judaism, upon whose realization we hope 
and wait. 



VI 

In the thirty-seventh chapter of the book bearing 
the name of the prophet Ezekiel, we read of a 
wonderful vision, which is told somewhat in these 
words : "The hand of the Lord was upon me, and 
carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set 
me down in the midst of the valley which was full 
of bones. . . . And he said unto me, Son of 
man, can these bones live ? And I answered, O 
Lord God, thou knowest. Again he said unto me, 
Prophesy upon these bones " . . . that they 
may live. And the spirit of God passed over 
them, and they became alive. The bones came 
together, bone to his bone; the sinews and the 
flesh came upon them, and the skin covered them 
above, and " they stood upon their feet an exceed- 
ing great army. Then he said unto me, Son of man, 
these bones are the whole house of Israel." 

This prophetic vision recurs to our minds, when 
we study the sixth great period of Jew- The j^sh 
ish history. And not this prophecy Renais- 
alone ; many others, proclaimed over sance 
three thousand years ago, seem to have reached 
fulfilment. We are tempted to exclaim like Mother 
Zion of old: "Who hath begotten me these, seeing 
I have lost my children, and am desolate, a captive, 
and removing to and fro ? and who hath brought 
up these ? Behold, I was left alone ; these, where 
had they been ? " And Jeremiah spoke truth when 
(93) 



94 JEWISH HISTORY 

he uttered the tender words: "Thus saith the 
Lord : I remember thee the kindness of thy youth, 
the love of thine espousals, when thou wentest 
after me in the wilderness, in a land that was not 
sown." 

Yea, these promises received their brilliant 
fulfilment in Israel, who for thousands of years 
had wandered through deserts and wildernesses, 
always obeying the call of his God, always led by 
a holy inspiration, as it was called, but in reality 
pursuing a noble aim. A modern poet has de- 
scribed Israel's aim in beautiful words. Having 
passed Israel's history in review, he said : "A his- 
tory like this cannot be an invention ; it cannot be 
a lie. It is the greatest poem of all times, whose 
composition will probably continue until the last 
phase has been reached in the destiny of all the 
nations of earth." 

How did the change come to pass ? In the fifth 
paper, we left the Israelitish race in about the mid- 
dle of the last century, the period of its lowest 
degradation. At no point in his changeful his- 
tory had Israel sunk so low in respect of intellect- 
uality, spirituality, religion, and morality as in the 
middle of the eighteenth century. Ignorant of the 
vernacular, excluded from public life, dependent 
upon the instruction of uncouth Polish teachers, 
without schools, without a suspicion of the glori- 
ous future destined for Israel, or of the glorious 
past he had lived through, slaves in aspect and in 
spirit thus lived the Jews, and none could have 
imagined that so brilliant a Renaissance awaited 



JEWISH HISTORY 95 

them a development so beautiful that it clamors 
for expression by the brush of a Michael Angelo 
or a Raphael. 

Barely fifty years elapse, and the Jews in Berlin 
are leaders in social life and in literature ; in France 
the public authorities declare the Jews citizens 
equal before the law to the other citizens ; and in 
America we hear the Declaration of Independence, 
the proclamation of the equality of all men before 
the tribunal of God. What a change, what a 
miracle! No man, however great, could have 
brought about so complete a revolution single- 
handed. We see the footsteps of a higher Power, 
the one whose traces we have noticed again and 
again in the history of Israel, most plainly when 
Israel's distress was most dire. 

The spirit of the Renaissance appears visibly 
incorporated in a boy of fourteen on Moses 
a certain day of the last century. In Mendels- 
1743, a poor, trembling, misshapen lad sohn 
knocked at the Rosenthal gate in Berlin, the only 
one by which Jews were permitted to enter the 
capital of Frederick the Great. To the clerk's 
question about his business in the city, he replied 
shyly : " Study." The boy was Moses Mendels- 
sohn. Twenty years later, he submitted in com- 
petition for a prize offered by the Academy of 
Sciences an essay " On Evidence in Metaphysics," 
which aroused the admiration of the judges. At 
about the same time the boy who had been com- 
pelled to pay a poll-tax on entering Berlin because 
he was a Jew, took occasion to admonish the Ger- 



Q6 JEWISH HISTORY 

man nation to cherish its peculiar spiritual treas- i 
ures more assiduously and not to deck itself with 
French tinsel. After another period of about 
twenty years, on his death, he was mourned by 
the world of letters and culture, and the greatest 
philosopher said: "There was but one Mendels- 
sohn I" And no voice was heard to dissent from 
the praise given him by one of the greatest poets : 
" A sage like Socrates, faithful to the customs of 
the fathers, teaching immortality, immortal like 
him." 

If it were possible to attribute the Renaissance 
to mortal agencies, we should have to lodge them 
in Moses Mendelssohn. He was no reformer, nor 
did he desire to become one. In his daily practice 
as in his views he held fast rigorously to the tra- 
ditions of Judaism. He was, what is far more, the 
Germanizer of the German Jews. If one cared to 
compare him with Martin Luther, the comparison 
would, in a measure, be justified, since he did for 
German Jews what Luther had done for Germans 
in general : he gave them the Bible, and with the 
German Bible he gave them the German language, 
the German spirit, German life. Long before the 
Jews possessed political rights, they enjoyed 
equality in art, in letters, and in society. For this 
the Jews are indebted to Mendelssohn, and they 
should never grow oblivious of his deserts. Polit- 
ical offices, it must be admitted, were unattainable 
by them ; even Frederick's " General Privilege " 
imposed numerous restrictions upon them. When 
Mendelssohn came to Berlin, the Jewish community 



JEWISH HISTORY 97 

frowned upon the reading of German books. A 
boy of fifteen, who had gone to fetch a German 
grammar for him, and was about to bring it to him, 
was caught in Spandanerstrasse by the overseer 
employed by the Berlin Jewish community to keep 
watch over the immigrant Jews. He took the book 
from the boy, roundly abused him, and procured 
his expulsion from Berlin. The little culprit was 
the grandfather of the late Gerson von Bleichrce- 
der, the banker. Mendelssohn took him under his 
protection, and settled him in Halberstadt, where 
he continued his education at the German school, 
and later founded his famous banking establish- 
ment. 

That is a little genre picture of the intellectual 
status of the Jews in Germany. Less than thirty 
years later it had ceased to be true to life. When 
Mendelssohn died, Henrietta Herz had already 
opened her salon, the meeting-place of all who had 
attained, or who gave promise of attaining, fame in 
German literature : the old rationalists, the leaders 
of the romanticism then in vogue, and the heads 
of the Young German movement, which obtained 
recognition a quarter of a century or more later. 
Before Moses Mendelssohn such a thing as socia- 
bility had been unknown in Berlin ; there were no 
social gatherings. A single cafe existed, at which 
the notabilities of the city met, and the castellan 
of the royal palace arranged conversazioni once or 
twice a week. That completes the description of 
Berlin society doings. Mendelssohn, only a poor 
book-keeper in the employ of the silk merchant 
7 



98 JEWISH HISTORY 

Isaac Bernhard, was the first to throw open his 
house hospitably. Poets, scholars, writers, poet- 
esses, princesses, all persons of note in the world 
of letters who came to Berlin, frequented his 
drawing-room. Joachim H. Campe, the well- 
known author of " Robinson," has left us an attrac- 
tive description of his afternoon at Mendelssohn's 
house, where a large company had gathered. It 
was in winter, when twilight sets in early. Men- 
delssohn disappeared, and when he returned, his 
wife became invisible. Suddenly the doors opened, 
and Frau Fromet Mendelssohn could be seen kind- 
ling the Sabbath lights and pronouncing the bless- 
ing over them. A feeling of holy awe, he continued, 
seized us, emanating from the spirit of the great 
philosopher, who had scaled the heights and ex- 
plored the depths of thought, yet bowed humbly 
before his God. Moses Mendelssohn is not to be 
held responsible for the course of development 
taken by Judaism in Germany ; he would have 
planned and recommended otherwise. Yet German 
Judaism owes him eternal gratitude. Like the first 
Moses, he liberated his people from Egyptian 
serfdom, and led them to spiritual heights. His 
contemporaries were not wrong in placing his name 
in proverbial connection with those of the two 
great Moses of earlier centuries. 

The story goes, that one evening in the later 
years of his life Mendelssohn, who, as is well 
known, lived in the house 68 Spandauerstrasse, 
was found, anxiety depicted on his countenance, 
sitting under the tree at that time still shading the 



JEWISH HISTORY 99 

house. When asked by his friend, " What is the 
matter, Mr. Mendelssohn? Are you in trouble?" 
he answered, " I am thinking of the future of my 
children." Possibly, a breath of the spirit that 
later worked such disastrous effect upon Judaism 
was even then passing over Berlin. We meet with 
a phenomenon oft-repeated in history. The mind 
freed from the fetters of the prison house rushes 
blindly beyond the mark in its eagerness to reach 
the new and the good, The disciples, the children, 
and the friends of Mendelssohn did not pursue the 
path cleared by him ; they deviated far from it. 
Intoxicated by the first draught from the cup of 
liberty proffered by the intellectual life of the 
period, they cast off the cloak that for thousands 
of years had afforded protection and warmth to the 
poor wanderers. 

Berlin society was swayed in particular by the 
women among the Jews. We must The Berlin 
draw a sharp distinction here between Jewesses 
what the Jews gave the German people and the 
due they failed to pay their own race. Before we 
pass judgment upon the celebrated men and women 
of that day, we must be sure that we are bearing 
in mind the characteristics of the time in which 
their powers matured. On the one side, Judaism 
in its most hideous guise ; ossified orthodoxy refus- 
ing entrance to the spirit of the times; repulsively 
ugly in form ; disgusting, because its deeply re- 
ligious essence was not recognized. On the other 
side, the exuberance of German intellectual life, 
the time of Frederick the Great, Immanuel Kant, 



100 JEWISH HISTORY 

Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller. At 
the parting of the ways the cultured Jews and 
Jewesses of Berlin stand, trying to choose between 
old, ugly Judaism, of whose beauty they had no 
conception, and German literature and life, which 
they absorbed naturally and joyously. Can we 
condemn them for the choice they made ? At the 
utmost we may pity them for not having been 
granted insight into the profundity of Judaism. 
With a high degree of propriety, the Berlin Jews 
of the period were called " the Jews of Frederick 
the Great," and the best known literary critics 
have acknowledged, that much of what Berlin did 
for the furtherance of German intellectual and 
social life is due to the influence of its Jews. 

Henrietta Herz, Dorothea Mendelssohn, the 
apostate daughter of a pious father, and Rachel 
Levin, supplied the new intellectual life with the 
germs of growth. When Rachel Levin became an 
enthusiastic Goethe admirer, fairly worshipping 
him as her god, she turned her back on Judaism. 
In a letter to Veit, she bewails her unhappiness : 
to have acquired so much culture, to have been 
endowed by God with so prophetic an insight into 
the future, and yet to have been sent into the 
world a Jewess! On her deathbed she spoke 
memorable words to her husband, Varnhagen von 
Ense, so weighty that he himself wrote them down 
in the sorrowful hour, when he was about to lose 
his adored wife forever. She said: "With sub- 
lime rapture I remember my origin and this whole 
chain of phenomena. What so long seemed only a 



JEWISH HISTORY IOI 

sore disgrace, a bitter enemy, and a misfortune, my 
Jewish birth, under no consideration would I have 
it otherwise now." 

We must retrace our steps somewhat. In the 
sixth period of Jewish history, leadership was as- 
sumed by the Judaism of Germany, TheEman- 
but it would be erroneous to suppose, cipation of 
that the efforts to liberate the Jews from , the J ews 
the bonds of servitude proceed-ecl - likewise fr&nV 
Germany. England was the .original home of the ; 
emancipation movement. English" ffdethin&ers; 
especially John Toland, as early as the end of the 
seventeenth century declared the equal rights of 
all men on earth, since they all are created in the 
image of God. 

England recalled the Jews, and was the first coun- 
try to grant them full liberty of worship. In 1776, 
America followed with the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence, and later came France with her Declaration 
of the Rights of Man, the equality of all men be- 
fore the law, which afterwards suffered modification 
in this or that particular, especially in Alsace, but 
was never revoked for France as a whole. In fact, 
when Napoleon was enjoying the triumph of his 
victories, he thought that he was adding the green- 
est leaf to his crown of laurels by giving attentive 
care to the Jewish people. He assembled the 
Notables of the Jewish world in a Synhedrion, 
which was to renew the glory of the olden time, 
the heyday of Jewish national life. In 1807 the 
Synhedrion was opened with elaborate military fes- 
tivities and all the pomp of the Napoleonic regime. 



102 JEWISH HISTORY 

It was asked to consider twelve questions on the 
Jewish law of marriage and divorce and on the 
points of the Jewish civil code bearing particularly 
upon the relations between Jews and Christians, 
naturally of greatest interest to outsiders. The 
answers and the resolutions of the Synhedrion are 
matters of history. They are informed by the 
spirit of Judaism^ unchanged since the earliest 
days : Judaism knows no hatred towards other 
nations ; Judaism is free from envy of other relig- 
ions", -Judaism teaches love of man, faith in one 
God, and hope in the fraternization of all men. 
Such ideas and views necessarily produced a pro- 
found reaction in favor of the Jews in their rela- 
tions to the various governments. The enlightened 
Austrian monarch, Joseph II, was the first to take 
these views into account in politics. Never before 
him had it been said, that Jews should be given 
the love and respect due to fellow men. Prussia 
was the last to take cognizance of the changed 
conditions. The Stein-Hardenberg edict, the seal 
and crown of the legislation by virtue of which 
Prussia became great, mighty, and influential in the 
council of the nations, gave expression to the pro- 
priety of emancipating the Jews. The hopes the 
Jews set in the edict were doomed to be blighted 
along with those of the whole German nation, and 
only in 1850 the equal rights of all religions were 
recognized in the constitution of Frederick William 
IV. The year 1871 finally removed the last obsta- 
cles theoretically in the way of the complete eman- 
cipation of the Jews. 



JEWISH HISTORY 103 

Apparently the political history of the Jews has 
reached its close. In many states, to be sure, rem- 
nants may be met with of the old conditions, and 
not everywhere are Jews permitted to take a place 
in public life unchallenged. But we trust in the 
power of time, and this confidence is not a little 
strengthened, when we remember the enormous 
revolution that has taken place in the century 
and a half since the lad Mendelssohn in fear and 
trembling begged admittance to Berlin. 

German Judaism, as I said above, assumed leader- 
ship in this last period of Jewish history, and the 
intellectual life of the Jews was as heavily freighted 
with important changes as their political fortunes. 
Abject degeneration was succeeded by a great 
upward development, whose impetus is to be sought 
in the free union between the Jewish and the 
German genius. The very Jews and Jewesses who 
became faithless to their religion at the beginning 
of this century a large part of the Berlin Jewish 
community embraced Christianity unconsciously 
to themselves and their more loyal brethren promot- 
ed the strivings of the Jewish spirit. Mendelssohn 
himself had entered into relations that exercised a 
favorable influence upon the future development of 
Judaism. It is well known, that he often visited 
the house No. 20 on the Nikolaikirch- Lessingand 
hofy now 8 Molkenmarkt, to play chess, Mendels- 
and that the chess-playing became the sohn 
basis of a close, ardent, and enduring friendship, 
forever linking together two exalted minds, Mendels- 
son and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. When Lessing 



104 JEWISH HISTORf 

wrote his v Nathan," he was obviously inspired oy 
Moses Mendelssohn's character. In him he saw 
the ideal Jew, the incarnation of the spiritual ideai 
cherished by the great Jewish thinkers of all the 
centuries. The Jews thenceforth had a great task 
to accomplish. As Mendelssohn had united Jew- 
ish and Hellenic life, so it was for them to display 
before the eyes of a wondering world the Jewish 
spirit in all the vigor and ideality of its renewal. 

Again the revival of Jewish intellectual life re- 
ceived its impetus at Berlin. The Jewish spirit 
had not yet spoken its last word ; the time had 
not yet come for it to merge itself in the spirit of 
the other nations. The greater part of its mission 
was still unfulfilled. Realizing this truth, three 
Berlin Jews met in 1819 to found the Society for 
the Culture and the Science of the Jews : Edward 
Gans, Moses Moser, and Leopold Zunz. The 
society suffered wreck. Violating old custom and 
tradition, the captain was the first to leave the 
ship: in 1825 Gans, the president of the society, 
accepted baptism in order to become professor at 
Berlin. Zunz was the one who recognized what 
was to be rescued from out of the general chaos as 
the only possession calculated to secure the future 
position of Judaism. In a letter of his addressed to 
Immanuel Wohlwill, a member of the dead society, 
this memorable passage occurs : " The only thing 
The Science that emerges from this chaos is the 
of Judaism science of Judaism. It lives, though 
not a finger be raised in its behalf/' Here for the 
first time the phrase, "the science of Judaism," 



JEWISH HISTORY 105 

was uttered, and as it fell upon the ears of the 
world, the figure of Jewish science was seen to rise 
above the waters of the deluge, and the truth was 
borne in upon all beholders, that this same science 
had been the salvation of Judaism in the gloomy 
past, and that in the new era it would equip Judaism 
for the conflict with nations mightier and individ- 
uals stronger than its enemies of old. The science 
of Judaism issued from Germany. Distinguished 
scholars in all lands, in Poland, Italy, and France, 
flocked to its standard. Exacting respect, com- 
manding reverence, equal to the sciences and the 
literatures of other nations, it challenges the criti- 
cism of all beholders, even of the renegades who 
had thought that Judaism had run its course, and 
who had said : " Come now, cast off your cloak. 
The breath of the new time is passing over us, and 
the nations are embracing us. Perish Judaism ! " 
The revival of Jewish science perforce carried 
with it a revival in the religious life. Reform and 
In the practice of the religion, how- Orthodoxy 
ever, unanimity did not prevail. On the one side, 
it was maintained, that Judaism can preserve itself 
only by casting off a large portion of its old cere- 
monies, and particularly by rearranging the public 
divine service in a dignified and attractive way. 
The chief defender of this view was Abraham 
Geiger in reverence his name be pronounced a 
man of intense enthusiasm and deep devotion to 
the sacred cause. He formulated a program for 
Judaism from the point of view of the demands of 
the new era. The older men did not hang back ; 



106 JEWISH HISTORY 

they no longer were of the opinion, that Judaism 
was incompatible with the progress of the times. 
On the other side were men no less equipped with 
the culture of the century, yet filled with devoted 
love for the old traditions and customs. Their 
leader was Samson Raphael Hirsch, and his name, 
too, should be mentioned with respect. Both par- 
ties were filled with inspired enthusiasm for Juda- 
ism, and the honest motive of the one and of the 
other was to secure its perpetuity for themselves 
and those to come after them. The conflict of 
views and parties has never ceased evidence that 
the Jewish mind neither wearies nor flags. 

With the contest between the two religious par- 
ties we have reached the threshold of the present. 
It was erroneous to believe thirty or forty years 
Anti- a > that the political history of the 

Semitism. Jews had ended with the assimilation 
ardently promoted by them. The last twenty years 
everywhere on the globe have brought us grave 
disappointment ; no less have they taught us a 
grave lesson. We know now, that our history has 
by no means come to an end ; that the nations may 
not demand from us a complete surrender of Juda- 
ism as the price of complete citizenship ; that in 
the future as in the past Judaism must pursue its 
own peculiar way. The storms now raging will 
pass, as others of their kind have passed. We 
who see everything, as Spinoza's phrase runs, sub 
specie ceternitatis, from the point of view of eternity; 
we who stand on a watch-tower higher than the 
battlements of a modern party ; we may indulge 



JEWISH HISTORY 107 

the confidence, that these storms, too, will blow 
over. We have weathered storms of worse kinds, 
and we have withstood enemies more powerful 
than the modern anti-Semites. We shall survive 
them as well. "Such a history," says Herder, 
" cannot be a lying invention ; it is an unsolved 
riddle in the history of mankind." 

We have arrived at our destination. It remains 
but to ask ourselves : What does the Lesson of 
history of the Jews teach us ? We Jewish 
have pursued the history through its History 
six great periods, step by step, from the ancient 
beginnings, and we have emerged into the sunlight 
of the present. What has it all meant to us? 
For, surely, history is not to be studied for its own 
sake. Who considers history as nothing more 
than a list of numbers and dates, battles and revo- 
lutions, victories and names of kings, does not 
understand the real meaning of history. Profound 
lessons are to be drawn from history, for the 
world is ruled according to eternal laws, and the 
law operating in Jewish history is the belief in un- 
alterable justice, unaffected by all the changes of 
the times, and from first to last dominant in the 
destiny of Israel. 

In the first book of the Bible we read a curious 
narrative. When the patriarch Jacob, after many 
years of exile from his home, was pursuing with 
yearning soul the road that led back to it, night 
overtook him, and a man assailed him and tried to 
kill him. Jacob wrestled with him through the 
night until the breaking of day. The combat ex- 



108 JEWISH HISTORY 

hausted him, but he did not yield. When morn- 
ing dawned, the adversary said: "Let me go, for 
the day breaketh." Jacob replied : " I will not let 
thee go except thou bless me." And he blessed 
him, and called him Israel, champion of God. The 
sun had risen upon Jacob, and he thanked God, 
whose arm he had recognized. 

In this simple account, we read, as it were, the 
whole history of the Jewish nation from its first 
origin in the Holy Land to its exile from its be- 
loved home and its yearning to return thither. 
The long, dark night came, and with it the adver- 
sary, bringing Israel hatred, enmity, and con- 
tumely. While the darkness lasted, Israel wrestled 
with him, and though the struggle often drained 
his strength, he was not conquered, for faith ever 
sustained his courage. And when the morning 
dawned, the adversary said : "Let me go, for the 
day breaketh." But Israel said : " I will not let 
thee go except thou bless me. It is not enough 
that thou hast left off from thy hostility towards 
me. I will not let thee go until thou givest me thy 
love and ownest me thine equal." Judaism would 
not have the right to demand love, if it had not 
been ever ready to treat the nations of the earth 
with love. 

When we scan the marvellous history of Judaism, 
we are struck by a remarkable phenomenon, a 
tragic-comical phenomenon, I am tempted to call it. 
On one side, offering defiance to a whole world 
ranged on the other side, stands a small, insignifi- 
cant band of men, a spiritual power, never weary, 



JEWISH HISTORY 109 

never disheartened, always maintaining its indi- 
viduality. Maintaining its individuality for what ? 
The purpose is expressed in the history of the 
tiny band. In the narrative from Genesis, Jacob 
is called champion of God, and that Israel must 
continue to be now and ever. Israel's mission is 
not yet fulfilled. Were it fulfilled, the world were 
a different place. Certain as it is, that in the last 
great struggle between the races of men Judaism 
will stand its ground, provided we do not lose from 
our consciousness the belief in our mission, to 
teach the world the knowledge of the one God (for 
even to-day the majority of mankind are heathen) ; 
so certain is it, that the time will come, when all 
the heathen, when every knee will bend before 
God, and all men will recognize that He is one 
unto the end of days. So long as religions exist, 
Judaism will exist. When all religions will have 
united, the religion of the prophets will prevail 
the religion consisting of the acknowledgment of 
one God in heaven above, the Ruler of the world, 
and of one realm on the earth below, the realm of 
fraternal love, humanity, liberty, and justice. 



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